![]() I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.” “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.” Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.” “During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. “It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.” “Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.” Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time.” Anybody who takes about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.” ![]() “It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.” “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.” “Character-the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life-is the source from which self-respect springs.” That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.” “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrustive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearranges of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” “The impulse to write things down is a particularly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.” “As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from ‘a broken home.’” The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.” Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad nobody wants to walk around with it. “Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. “When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.” Or if people think they’re good parents, they ought to think again.” “I don’t think anybody feels like they’re a good parent.
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