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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
American
Settlement
Beautiful
Gratification
Vegas
Bizarre
Immediate
Extreme
Venality
Devotion
Allegorical
Extremes
Settlements

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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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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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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
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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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Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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I lead a very conventional life.
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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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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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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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I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
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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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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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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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What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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