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in order to be a writer I needed to stay alive.
“You’re too young to write off your weaknesses as failures,” I said. “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.”
“Everyone has secrets. There’s something in all our pasts that we wouldn’t want to be revealed. 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. A hotel can be a fascinating place. Hundreds of people gathered together in one building, yet each one desperate to maintain their privacy.”
found the atmosphere oppressive with the extraordinary numbers gathered there and the terrifying noise of unenlightened patriotism.
there was anxiety in his tone now. Fear. This was not an opinion that people voiced out loud, even if they felt it, and especially not to a new acquaintance whose trustworthiness had yet to be established.
“He has charisma, it’s true, and his oratorical skills incite the crowds. The people are behind him for now. He has infected them with his hatred. He demands absolute loyalty, and when anyone dares to criticize him, they lose their position. I think he will lead a great army, but what will be the result?”
“You’re a controversialist, then,” I said. “No,” he replied. “I’m a fiction writer with an expensive apartment overlooking Central Park West. And I need to sell books in order to pay the co-op fees.”
He was the type of writer I thought of as a professional queer, one whose nature defined both his public persona and his work, and that was something that had always made me uncomfortable.
Kind of Boyne describingv himself?
(They made no mention of my ill-advised collection of poetry, although I can only assume that this was an oversight on their part.)
Perhaps it would be a good idea if everyone just stopped writing for a couple of years and allowed readers to catch up.
“No, that was Günter Grass.”
How competitive everyone is in expressing their outrage!
“What was it Woodrow Wilson said?” asked Gore. “That loyalty means nothing unless it has at its heart the absolute principle of self-sacrifice? Something along those lines?”
Wasn’t there something in Wuthering Heights about Heathcliff wanting Cathy to die before him so she wouldn’t have to go through the trauma of a life spent alone?
You know you’ve gone off the deep end when you start obsessing about the Brontës.”
“All right. But you know what they say in Italy, yes? Quando dio vuole castigarci, ci manda quello che desideriamo.” “Which means?” “When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.”
When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it. —Anatole France
You see, Maurice, you might not have been very good at coming up with ideas for your books but no one could ever have denied that you had a way with words.
“It’s the media, darling,” I would say, leaning in toward my opponent’s ear. “You know what it’s like. You can’t say a word without it being misinterpreted.” And I was generally believed too, for I knew them and they knew me and, anyway, we were all at it.
What mattered was that I mattered, that I was taken seriously.
If you’ll forgive the flattery, the range of your work is so extraordinary that somehow it seems astonishing to me that it could all have come from the same mind.
Staring at my reflection now, however, I wondered whether I would ever have the opportunity to turn someone’s advances down again.
I was growing old, it was clear, and not gracefully.
would approve of what I was about to do but insisted to myself that he would, despite his irritating and adolescent belief in moral absolutes. For he had loved me and I had been a good if imperfect father, almost to the end. What else would he want for me than that I be happy? Otherwise, what had it all been for?
inventing a story on the spot
I love fiction but I don’t have the sort of brain that could create my own. I mean, I can write pretty well, I think. But only essays and things like that. Nonfiction. I could never write a short story or a novel. I wouldn’t be able to think up a plot, you know? It’s just not a gift that I’ve been given.”
I simply made the man’s acquaintance and one thing, as they say, led to another. It wasn’t a setup. I can hardly be blamed if he revealed things to me that, later on, he came to regret saying.”
“So you felt no guilt about what happened to him?” he asked. “Not particularly, no,” I said, frowning. “Why, do you think I should have?”
“You say ‘them,’ ” said Theo with a half-smile. “Not ‘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.
My routine had become completely destroyed since I’d met this boy
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.
For a brief time, I became the most famous writer in the world, which was enormously pleasing and everything I’d ever hoped for.
So, this was what self-destruction felt like.
I protested that I had never committed such a heinous crime, that the two most obvious deaths on my conscience had been manslaughter,
Of course, my publishers were left in something of a dilemma. What do you do when one of the most famous writers in the world—if not the most famous—is in disgrace but everyone is desperate to read the offending books out of a macabre fascination? This is what you do: you reprint all the books in new editions—except The Tribesman, of course, which is now only printed under Edith’s name—and donate thirty percent of the royalties to charity. And you pocket the rest.
