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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
Freedom
Absolutes
Money
Absolute
Power
Sake
America
Neither
Things
Wealth
Personal
Secret
Mobility
Point
Privacy

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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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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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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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Writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
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Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.
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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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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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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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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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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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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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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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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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[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
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