The Ghost Writer Quotes
"Purity. Serenity. Simplicity. Seclusion. All one’s concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the grueling, exalted, transcendent calling."
"I looked around and I thought, This is how I will live."
"How would you prefer to be addressed?" asked Emanuel Isidore Lonoff. "As Nathan, Nate, or Nat? Or have you another preference entirely?"
"I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again."
"I know who I am. I know the kind of man I am and the kind of writer."
"If your life consists of reading and writing and looking at the snow, you’ll wind up like me. Fantasy for thirty years."
"All I was trying to say is that he oughtn’t to stifle what is clearly his gift."
"I have neither too high nor too low an estimate of my work. I believe I know exactly wherein my value and originality lie."
"I was expressing distaste for the range of my imagination."
"I wound up in wonder at the idiot I had been to relinquish her love."
"I don’t know what I expected to see revealed there—the future probably, the titles of my first ten books—but I do remember thinking that this photograph of an intense and serious young writer playing so gently with a kitty cat, and said to be living in a five-flight Village walk-up with a young ballerina, might inspire any number of thrilling women to want to try to take her place."
"Ordinary human pleasures have nothing to do with it. Ordinary human pleasures be damned. The young man wants to be an artist."
"The young rabbi in Pittsfield can’t live with the idea that I won’t be ‘active.'"
"I had the bed. I know my singularity," said Lonoff, "and what I owe to it."
"Zuckerman has the most compelling voice I’ve encountered in years, certainly for somebody starting out."
"There. I tried to envision it, but couldn’t. It was more than I could take being here."
"A man, his destiny, and his work—all one. What a terrible triumph!"
"We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
"Who could sleep after that? I didn’t even turn the lamp off to try."
"The point is, there is far more to our family than this. And you know that."
"But with great talent come great responsibilities, and an obligation to those who have stood behind you in the early days so that your talent might come to fruition."
"Writers aren't writers if they didn't have the strength to face the insolubility of that conflict and go on."
"Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
"We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have."
"I have now reached the stage that I can live entirely on my own, without Mummy's support or anyone else's for that matter."
"You must believe me—I'm not some girl trying to be interesting and imitate your art!"
"To be truthful, while Margot was thinking about God and the homeland, the only deities she ever seemed to contemplate at any length were to be found in the mythology of Greece and Rome."
"Our family’s affinity with what families were suffering everywhere had been clear to me right from the beginning."
"To expect the great callous and indifferent world to care about the child of a pious, bearded father living under the sway of the rabbis and the rituals—that was pure folly."
"How could even the most obtuse of the ordinary ignore what had been done to the Jews just for being Jews."
"It did not even take that much. It took nothing—that was the horror. And that was the truth. And that was the power of her book."
"Europe was not theirs nor were they Europe’s, not even her Europeanized family."
"Her responsibility was to the dead, if to anyone—to her sister, to her mother, to all the slaughtered schoolchildren who had been her friends."
"An ax was what she really wanted, not print."
"The importance, so-called, of this book is a morbid illusion."
"Who was she pretending to be but who she would have been anyway if no achterhuis and no death camps had intervened?"
"There was nothing to give the dead—they were dead."
"I was the incarnation of the millions of unlived years robbed from the murdered Jews. It was too late to be alive now. I was a saint."
"That she meant every word and that not a word was true."
"Passivity in a man of stature has a charm and mystery all its own."
"If you even go out to dinner, if once in six months you get him to accept an invitation to somebody’s home, then it’ll be even worse—then for the hour before you go your life will be misery from his kvetching about what it’s going to be like when those people start in with their ideas."
"Nothing can be touched, nothing can be changed, everybody must be quiet, the children must shut up, their friends must stay away until four."