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The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Way
Life
Apparent
Temporary
California
Ease
Illusion
Live
Believe

More quotes by Joan Didion

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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.
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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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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I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
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Anything worth having has its price.
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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.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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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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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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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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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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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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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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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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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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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.
Joan Didion
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I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.
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There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
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