Reading
“You’re living in two worlds. You’re living in a public one, and you believe it, you believe that the Russians are your enemies. And you’re living in a private world where this Russian is the father you love.”
And T.S. Eliot, I remember his giving a reading at the University of Michigan, and the entire football stadium was filled to hear him speak. Eliot had that kind of celebrity. He had a kind of authority.
“Going from New York Press to Talk was a bit like going from the St. Ann’s School to the Collegiate School. At New York Press you could pretty much wear whatever you want.
“It’s funny, too. The people I really wanted to meet were writers. I had some notion of meeting Flannery O’Connor, you know, or even now, I imagine meeting Cormac McCarthy. Writers were my heroes.”
“Liberalism went from being populist to being corporate, from being Jeffersonian to being New Deal. And it had its greatest successes, and it also had its greatest defeat, as a result of that change."
"In Texas, people will laugh at anything. So you can still learn things from reading out loud there, but you can’t think, ‘Oh well, this works great. They laughed in Texas.’ Maybe they’re just trying to be polite."
"You would be surprised at the number of gerontophiles. You realize there are a lot of people who didn’t take notice of you when you were in your 20s, who get interested once you’re over 45 or 55.”
They seemed vaguely hostile toward Brookner’s stories. “Nothing happens,” one said. We argued a bit. I suggested that plenty happened; it was just that what happened, happened inside her characters’ heads rather than between sheets or on battlefields.
I’d be up until three or four o’clock in the morning, when I first started reading Hemingway, jumping up, saying, ‘Mom, listen to this, isn’t this something, isn’t it unbelievable?’ I’d shake her, and she’d wake up.
The evening began a little after eight in the bar at Sanborn’s on Revolución where eight poets gathered for drinks and chisme (gossip). Around midnight one of them suggested we move on to El Lugar …
I didn’t become an historian and I didn’t become a Cold War researcher. With my father’s encouragement, I spent a long time trying to create a life that wasn’t just being the son of Alger Hiss.
Dillard is one of those writers whose work I so admire that I dread interviewing them. I always think, before I dial up the telephone numbers, “I should leave them alone to do what they do so well.”
“With men, from the beginning, I was messed up. Drinking exacerbated that. One of the things that alcohol really enabled me to do was to mess up my connection to men and to never have to really think about it."
What a sense of humanity permeated his stories! He had seen the worst of men. Even people that you know he doesn’t like and you wouldn’t like if you knew them, he is compassionate towards.
Stevens finally assented to his father’s bleak view and became a lawyer. He moved to Hartford, Connecticut, and worked for 30 years at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, becoming one of its vice presidents.
I wasn’t happy when I found a book I’d written, inscribed by me to another writer, for sale at Powell’s in Portland. But I did not have to be embarrassed in the way that Theroux must have felt embarrassed.