Quotes from Brian Morton

This is what an artist is, she thought. This is the temperament you need to spend a whole day tinkering with a sentence, making sure that both the meaning and the music are right; to spend three or seven or ten years working on a book.

The desire to learn from people was always bound up with the desire to seem special to them.

You just sit down at the typewriter and follow the character around. It's like being a detective. You write page after page after page just finding out who they are. You wait for them to do something interesting.

do. If life had taught her anything—if she had a philosophy of life—it probably boiled down to that: Go with the skid.

He had found himself ridiculously impressed by this young woman. She would blow in like a little whirlwind, eager to hear him say wise things; and he wanted to have wise things to say—he wanted to be worthy of her admiration. More than that. He wanted her to be in love with him. Idiotic, but true.

But. There's always a "but" in life, isn't there?

Maybe it was three strikes, because not only was she an intellectual, she was a feminist. Which meant that if she ever managed to finish this book, reviewers

when she contemplated marrying him—when she even contemplated sleeping with him—though some clear voice in her mind shouted "No!," she thought the voice could be overruled.

It reminded her of something she'd once read, about how an artist doesn't really need a great deal of experience. One heartbreak can produce many novels. But you have to have a heart that can break.

It was the refrigerator of a man who was worried about his health. It was also the refrigerator of a man from another generation.

I have this old-fashioned idea that art and commerce are at war.

The people she admired in his books were people who walked away from the lives that other people expected them to live—Ellen in his first novel, the bohemian painters in his second.

he didn't believe your worth was based on your attainments or your erudition or even your intelligence. Just about the only thing he valued was simple decency.

He wanted to live without distractions; he wanted to focus all the life-force he had left on this last book. But now it was hard to concentrate. There was something new in his life. There was the painful distraction of desire.

For a parent, time is not a one-way street. In Janine's mind, the nineteen-year-old Emily was accompanied, shadowed, by the infant Emily, and the toddler Emily, and Emily in all her other incarnations. So when she came out with a shrewd perception or a sophisticated thought, it was always something to marvel at, because it was as if the five-year-old Emily were saying it too. A parent is perpetually thinking, "Where did she learn that?

So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all.

Every choice we make is either a growth choice or a fear choice.