“Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey,a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arrival. When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.””
“[A]fter all, the position of a reader in a book is very like that occupied by angels in the world, when angels still had any credibility. Yours is, like theirs, a hovering, gravely attentive presence, observing everything, from whom nothing is concealed, for angels are very bright mirrors. Hearts and minds are as open as the landscape to their view, as to yours; like them you are in the fabled world invisible.””
“I have no idea who he is but I want him to be mine. He stares at me intensely and I resent how he makes me feel. I’m a successful businesswoman, an icon in my industry. I command enormously generous payments for the work I do. I don’t sit in cafes wondering if I might be drooling over a stranger.””
“I don’t have a spare two weeks for more than two years. That’s how booked out I am. I have commitments and I always keep them. It’s how I earn the big dollars. It’s why, amongst the slim echelons of ghostwriters in the world, I’m famous. It’s why Mr Basketball has waited twelve months to meet me and agreed to sandwich it into a day we were both flying to other cities. My flight left in an hour.””
“You pretend to be other people to write their stories.” He made it sound like a bad thing. “Writing is a craft. Not everyone has the time to learn it in a way that makes it commercially viable.” Not everyone knew where to put a semicolon, or in the case of the pop star whose biography I’d just written, that it wasn’t a body part.””
“You’re a puppet master. You make unworthy, uninteresting, vapid people sound like paragons of virtue.” “I’m a writer and a successful one, and I’m sorry I can’t help you.””