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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Loss
Sense
Place
Suspension
Boom
Uneasy
Mentality
California
Meet

More quotes by Joan Didion

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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.
Joan Didion
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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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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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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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I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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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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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
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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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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.
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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.
Joan Didion
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
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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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I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.
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