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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Disillusionment
Stripped
Delusion
Innocence
Likes
Oneself
Ends

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The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.
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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
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Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
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We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
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Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.
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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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I've come to a much more controlled idea about death and loss, but I don't think it's possible to come to that much more controlled idea until you've gone through the crazy part . . . I don't mean that I'm controlled. I mean that I gave up the idea that I had control. That's the new control.
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
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