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"There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."
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Exlpore more Authorship quotes
"We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship."
"Tell him I said that he will know when he's my age that books aren't written on whims or old promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writing's a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back."
"I didn't really escape that gravity until I moved 300 miles south to go to college at 18, where authorship no longer seemed something liable to induce vengeful punishment."
"Authorship of anything apart from God is nothing more than a tragedy in the making."
"I'm proud to be a writer. I'm doing the job all my heroes did."
"But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?"
"To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.If a man writes well only when he's drunk, then I'll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it's bad for his liver, I'll answer: What's your liver? A dead thing that lives while you live, whereas the poems you write live without while."
"I have a handful of prayers that I pray all the time... One is that God will put my books into the right hands at the right times. I've prayed this prayer thousands of times, and God has answered it in dramatic fashion countless times. The right book in the right hands at the right time can save a marriage, avert a mistake, demand a decision, plant a seed, conceive a dream, solve a problem, and prompt a prayer. That is why I write. And that's why, for me, a book sold is not a book sold; a book sold is a prayer answered. I don't know the name and situation of every reader, but God does, and that's all that matters."
"I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer."
"What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes."
Explore more quotes by Joan Didion
"I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response."
"As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become..."
"I went on a book tour immediately after 9/11. I was due to leave the following Wednesday, so I just did. It was an amazing thing, because planes hadn't been flying very many days, and I got on this plane and went to San Francisco, and the minute that plane lifted above the clouds, I felt this incredible sense of lightness."
"We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as 'ordinary blessings."
"A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.Wrong, I want to say.In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age."
"I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story."
"I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually feel this faith in the future."
"Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?"
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