Quote

A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Moment
Dress
Long
Woman
Lays
Riviera
White
Dresses
Halter
Tell
Begin
Casino
Moments
Short
Casinos
Hair
Vegas
Young
Walks
Gambling
Play
Morning
Precisely
Made

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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.
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Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.
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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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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
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The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
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What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
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Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
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When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.
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For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.
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A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
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I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape
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Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.
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