Hemingway's cold veneer makes me suicidal, I noted halfway through. But the ending of this, which I found to be a kind of happy cop-out (to be fair his manuscript wasn't done), was more despairing because less true. All the same, I feel I learned a lot more about writing from this book than I did from many craft books.

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." -Marita

"It's a book you had to die to write and you had to be completely destroyed." -Catherine

"He treated evil like an old entrusted friend, David thought, and evil, when she poxed him, never knew she'd scored. His father was not vulnerable he knew and, unlike most people he had known, only death could kill him."

"There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won't betray them. The writing is the only progress you make."

"But, Marita, nobody knows about himself when he is really involved. Yourself isn't worth considering. It would be shameful at the time." -David