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Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Bizarre
Immediate
Extreme
Venality
Devotion
Allegorical
Extremes
Settlements
American
Settlement
Beautiful
Gratification
Vegas

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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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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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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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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.
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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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Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
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My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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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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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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