"As a writer, even as a child," she writes, "I developed a sense that
meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and
paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or
believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish."
-- Joan Didion, quoted in "Writing About Writers" By Bob Thompson,
The American Scholar.
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/writing-about-writers/