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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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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Power
Sake
America
Neither
Things
Wealth
Personal
Secret
Mobility
Point
Privacy
Freedom
Absolutes
Money
Absolute

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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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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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Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
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I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.
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Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
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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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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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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it.
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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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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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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Anything worth having has its price.
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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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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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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