Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

I sensed it was not going to be one of my good days and that only made me panic more, so I gushed and blubbered and embarrassed the man, and I could feel myself slipping down the iceberg and I couldn’t stop. This was the one day when I wanted to be wonderful and it was a fucking nightmare and when it was over I thought, well, thank God, I can’t be any worse— —and then I did it. We were walking along Park Avenue just before parting and I was talking about how he never made me stop reading, never used the wrong word, that great simplicity of the storytelling, and I heard myself saying these terrible words: It’s easy for you, isn’t it, the writing? I still see this sad look in his eyes as he turned to me. And I don’t know what he was thinking but I knew I had disappointed him so badly. I had trivialized the man, I had ignored his pain. “It wasn’t easy,” he said very softly. He went his way, I mine, and I guess that was the worst lunch of my life, because the one thing we have, everyone who writes or paints or composes, is our pain—pain that we deal with by huddling away in our pits and getting through it as best we can.