The object of war is to survive it.
A what?” said Egg. No doubt he thought that an inferiority complex was a weapon; sometimes, I guess, it is.
Okay,” I said. There are these moments when you see the course of your life unfolding, and you feel powerless to alter it.
Greene’s writing – he was the first modern writer I liked. Before Greene, my heroes were all novelists from the nineteenth century. Living in the nineteenth century can expand your loneliness; as a writer, it’s lonely living there.
They resembled an elderly, long-married couple – devoted to each other without conversation.
But you don’t see with hindsight in a first draft. You have to finish the first draft to see what you’ve missed.
Elliot told me that bigots could be “slippery” if you accused them outright.
The past is everlasting.
It sounds the same to me, Kid,” Molly said. “The new lift takes you to the same old place. It’s the same trip, just a faster ride – it’s no more or less depressing than it ever was,” she added.
As Nora had also said, “Nothing will change.” She meant the Catholic Church and the Republicans, but – according to Em – the Republicans would get worse.
Reading good novels can make young readers seem more experienced about relationships than they are.
When you write about your life as a screenplay, it’s as if you’re watching someone else’s life; it’s not your life, and you’re not living it. You’re only seeing what the characters do, your character included. And screenplays are written in the present tense – as if nothing has already happened, as if everything is unfolding in the present. I’m only saying this is how it started – how I began to see my life as an unmade movie. The way it began was almost natural. INT.
Reading good novels can make almost anything seem imaginable.
Murder, more murders, still more murders! The Germans take murder more seriously than we do – I mean, as literature,” Uncle Johan explained.
What my grandmother meant was that supper was ready to eat. Only the cooking of it was finished. As usual, it was an overcooked casserole of unidentifiable ingredients; it was mortally finished, a casserole cooked into submission. Also finished was what remained of my aunts’ patience with my uncles’ lack of clarity concerning their wartime memories.
My mother named me Adam, like you-know-who.
Of course, I was not yet born when my mother told her parents she was pregnant.
There’s a reason we’re fiction writers, you know – real life sucks; make-believe is our business,” I try to tell her.
This gets complicated, because I know that not all ghosts are dead. In certain cases, you can be a ghost and still be half-alive – only a significant part of you has died. I wonder how many of these half-alive ghosts are aware of what has died in them, and – dead or alive – if there are rules for ghosts.
Adam, we can’t make being safe the guiding principle of our lives. We have to be who we are – we can only do what we do, sweetie.
Even before she started talking to Franny, I could see how desperately important this woman’s private unhappiness was to her, and how – in her mind – the only credible reaction to the event of rape was hers. That someone else might have responded differently to a similar abuse only meant to her that the abuse couldn’t possibly have been the same.