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. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.

About Joan Didion

Portrait of Joan Didion

Joan Didion (; December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021) was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism, along with Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe.

More quotations from Joan Didion

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth… is potentially to have everything…

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.

I… have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.

How easy it is for generous sentiments, high courtesy, and chivalrous courage to lose their influence beneath the chilling blight of selfishness, and to exhibit to the world a man who was great in all the minor attributes of character, but who was found wanting when it became necessary to prove how much principle is superior to policy.

Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself.

History

4 Jul 2015 Added
26 Oct 2026 Wording changed

Previous wording

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. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.