More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’
The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.
‘Yes, Tatie, and you and Chink always talking about how to make things true, writing them, and put them rightly and not describe.
It often took me a full morning of work to write a paragraph.
While I had been angry I had demoted him from Scott to Fitzgerald. Later I was delighted that I had used up the anger at the start and got it over with. It was not a trip designed for a man easy to anger.
Lyon was not a very cheerful town at night. It was a big, heavy, solid-money town, probably fine if you had money and liked that sort of town. For years I had heard about the wonderful chicken in the restaurants there, but we had eaten mutton instead. The mutton had been excellent.
He also explained that diseases were different in different parts of America, and if my father had practised medicine in New York instead of in the Middle West, he would have known an entirely different gamut of diseases. He used the word gamut.
I was getting tired of the literary life, if this was the literary life that I was leading, and already I missed not working and I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.
He was always trying to work. Each day he would try and fail. He laid the failure to Paris, the town best organized for a. writer to write in that there is.
