Цитаты из произведения Призрак писателя

"Did you ever get the feeling that you wanted to go, still had the feeling that you wanted to stay?"

Most men want to be children again, or kings, or quarterbacks, or multimillionaires. All Lonoff seemed to want was a thirty-five-year-old woman and a year abroad.

Really, who knew better than E.I.Lonoff that it is not our high purposes alone that make us moving creatures, but our humble needs and cravings?

"It's like being married to Tolstoy," he said, and left me to make my feverish notes while he started off after the runaway spouse, some five minutes now into her doomed journey in search of a less noble calling.

The study group turned out to have ideas about writing that were too imaginative for his taste, but he made no effort to tell them they were wrong... He had no desire to change anyone's mind. Fiction made people say all kinds of strange things - so be it.

Hadn't Joyce, hadn't Flaubert, hadn't Thomas Wolfe, the romantic genius of my high-school reading list, all been condemned for disloyalty by those who saw themselves as slandered in their works?

On a large lined pad that I took from my briefcase, a bulging Bildungsroman briefcase - ten pounds of books, five obscure magazines, and easily enough paper to write the whole of my first novel if it should happen to come to me while riding back and forth on the bus - I began methodically to list everything on his…

After what Lonoff had been telling me all evening, I could understand why he might want these three sentences hanging over his head while beneath them he sat turning his own sentences around. "We work in the dark - we do what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."…

Meanwhile, he was saying to me, "I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around.…