A Ladder to the Sky

by John Boyne

‘I want to be a success,’ he replied, and perhaps I should have heard the deep intent in his tone and been frightened by it. ‘It’s all that matters to me. I’ll do whatever it takes to succeed.’

‘The more you read, the more you write, the more the ideas will appear. They’ll fall like confetti around your head and your only difficulty will be deciding which ones to catch and which to let fall to the floor.’

Look around the foyer the next time you’re there and ask yourself, What would each of these people prefer that I didn’t know about them? And that’s where you’ll find your story.

the terrifying noise of unenlightened patriotism.

Perhaps it would be a good idea if everyone just stopped writing for a couple of years and allowed readers to catch up.

Quando dio vuole castigarci, ci manda quello che desideriamo.’ ‘Which means?’ ‘When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.’

‘I don’t read books by fascists,’ I said. ‘Why ever not? There’s not much left to read if you ignore them. Writers are all fascists. We like to control the discourse and crush anyone who dares to disagree with us.’

‘And you’ve heard the old proverb about ambition, haven’t you?’ He shook his head. ‘That it’s like setting a ladder to the sky. A pointless waste of energy.

Many years ago, at the end of our acquaintance, I suggested to Erich Ackermann that perhaps he had seen me as he wanted me to be and not as who I actually was. I was right then, but the truth is that I made a similar mistake with Theo. Was it an absurd mixture of grief, guilt and alcoholism that allowed me to believe I was confessing everything to Daniel and that he would somehow forgive me and make my world clean again?

One declared that he had originally considered The Tribesman to be a masterpiece, but now that he knew it had actually been written by a woman, he was revising that opinion and realized that it was just a tedious piece of domestic trivia, driven by sentimentality.