Quote of the Hour: If You Can Dream It, You Can Do It

In fact this kind of faith is not unusual in Los Angeles. In a city not only largely conceived as a series of real estate promotion but largely supported by a series of confidence games, a city even then afloat on motion pictures and junk bonds and the B-2 Stealth bomber, the conviction that something can be made of nothing may be one of the few narratives in which everyone participates. A belief in extreme possibilities colors daily life. Anyone might have woken up one morning and been discovered at Schwab's, or killed at Bob's Big Boy.

 - Joan Didion, "L.A. Noir," in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, pp.563-54