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: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Young
Hair
Vegas
Play
Walks
Gambling
Made
Morning
Precisely
Long
Moment
Dress
Woman
Lays
Riviera
White
Dresses
Halter
Tell
Begin
Casino
Moments
Short
Casinos

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When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.
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Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
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Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.
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we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
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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 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 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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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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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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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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