Novelists From The United States

"I have lived in the best of all possible worlds; the only world, so far as we know, on which human beings can live and have their being; it has been my privilege to be a human being on the planet Earth. There is, for me, something fantastic in the idea of being here at all. Always I have felt a little incredulous of the whole business."

"Writing is lonely work but the creative writer is rarely alone. The room in which one works is peopled with the men and women and children of the writer’s imagination … Often they are so much more fascinating to the writer than the living people one actually encounters that to go to a party, a dinner, even to the company of chosen people created by oneself."

"Short stories are the form of youth. You must have a plot, a situation, and distinctive characters. You take this and throw it away in a few thousand words when it could be made into a novel. That is very unthrifty, and it is not fair to the characters. They need more space."

"Of course I can’t write all the time. Some days I sit and sit and SIT at my machines and not a word will come. But I sit there and if it is possible I write something, it doesn’t matter what. The next day I may have to tear it up, but often what I think is very poor the first day turns out to be usable in spots."

"The energy of American Jewish writers was so charged, so buoyant, that for a time they appeared to dominate American fiction. But there was so little Jewish energy in this art that one could invent parlor games over the ethnic or religious identity of its authors: Edna Ferber? Waldo Frank? Lillian Hellman? Nathanael West? Norman Mailer? E. L. Doctorow?"

"What followed was the well-known phenomenon of a group, asked a simple question with an obvious answer, that nevertheless remains silent as everybody waits for somebody else to trigger a suspected rhetorical trap."

"I’m going to die. But that meant nothing, too, because we were all going to die, and every breath of air I managed to wrest from the universe was one more the nightmares of my childhood had failed to deny me. When I breathed it was an act of defiance. When I breathed it was a victory."

"It’s almost comical. Nobody knew anything, but everybody took that as proof of the hypothesis."

"She’s a little bit below mediocre, isn’t she? And the worst kind of below-par personality at that: the kind who believes herself destined for great things."

"It was stupid to feel fear. Fear was nothing but the body’s involuntary response to perceived threats. Fear increased heartbeat, respiration, and perspiration; fear clouded the mind and paralyzed the limbs, and I’m going to die wasn’t subject to logical arguments about its counterproductivity."

"His smile was the wholly unpersuasive kind that only a professional diplomat could carve. Damned if there wasn’t some pretense of compassion in his voice, some veneer of fatherly understanding that gave every word out of his mouth an extra, oily sheen."

"“You know what murder investigators call the ex-lover who says the dead woman slept around?” “I think I can guess.” “The most likely suspect.”"

"“In my experience, mediocrity in life-or-death situations gets people killed.” He looked knowing. “Read your history. Greatness kills more.” There was nothing I could say to that."

"He’d played me very well. He’s sensed my misanthropy, and played up that aspect of his own personality. He’d even accused the Porrinyards of the same failing. But was that just the typical gamesmanship of a habitual manipulator, or the obfuscation of a sociopath?"

"You want to know why humanity’s never been involved in a serious interspecies conflict? Because it’s like going out to eat when you have a pantry full of food at home. Why bother sampling the buffets elsewhere when we haven’t worked out all the great ways to kill each other yet?"

"When you get to the core of it, we’re all aliens to one another, raised according to some common precepts but otherwise ruled by paradigms far removed from those of the people around us. The tragedy is that we tend to judge others by standards that may make perfect sense to us but which are most likely totally irrelevant to them."

"I could only read the delay as a dramatic pause. Theatrics. Or diplomacy; wise men throughout history had already noticed that sometimes there wasn’t much of a difference between the two."

"They all wore the slack-bored expression of folks doomed to spend all of eternity on an infinitely long supermarket checkout line."

"There had never been any violence in her life, up until those last few hours—and there seemed no reason beyond simple self-defense for her to feel the urgency she felt now. But she did hunger for it. She wanted to feel something alive turn to something dead. She wanted to stand above it at the moment of its dying, and feel the satisfaction of knowing that she’d been the one who drove it from the world of things that live and breathe and feel into the world of things that merely rot."

"Cottonmouth was the kind of small town that hugs its knees to its chest and shuts out all evidence of a greater world beyond."

"It was nobody’s idea of luxurious travel, but then I’d known luxurious travel once or twice in my life and found that it just got me to places at the same speed while forcing me to interact with the kind of people who could afford such passage."

"Every once in a while, some poor bastard get saddled with the kind of impossible decision that destroys his career and makes his name a curse for the next hundred years."

"In short, they were like the complacent everywhere: in that they were already dead, and did not yet happen to know it…"

"It was the sort of platitude-laden gibberish that people learn to repeat so they can imagine themselves clever without ever bothering to think an original thought themselves."

"There was never any shortage of Despair; it had always been far more common than hope, and there was always more being manufactured, everywhere in the universe. That was what made it such a convenient, and inexhaustible, Fuel."

"All of this had seemed so obvious and vital to them once. But then it changed, in the timeless time since putting their vessel together; some might even say, they’d degenerated. They were no longer the beings who’d set themselves an impossible task and built themselves a miraculous vessel to help them accomplish it. In that time they had forgotten all of their arcane and hard-won knowledge and become passengers, instead of engineers. Now the bubble piloted itself, without their input; and the glorious mission that had once been the whole reason for their existence now seemed nothing but an ancient folly, too far gone to change. They wouldn’t have understood Vietnam, but they would have sympathized."

"Art isn’t just technique, in any culture…it’s also Content. It’s understanding not just How, but also What, to express."

"Middle management has always favored underlings friendly to middle management. It’s corruption, all right, but of a minor and probably unavoidable sort."

"It occurred to me a long time ago, Mr. Lastogne, that diplomacy has very little to do with making friends."

"“The question is, just how do we tackle this problem? Do we merely modulate your Ego so it’s less irritating? Admittedly, that might make you easier to take – but it won’t address the real core of the problem, which is that when all is said and done you really don’t have a lot to be egotistical about.” “That can’t be true! My Haiku alone –” “First rule of human social interaction, Mr. Porter: If you have to lead with Haiku, you’ve already lost.”"

"Like all career diplomats, he’d spent a lifetime sculpting the truth into the shapes that best suited the needs of the moment, and would see nothing wrong with doing the same now."

"What Nancy Peabody can be blamed for was actually behaving like a crowbar, designed to pry open the locked places belonging to others. Not that she was interested in stealing material things. No, her sin was much more insidious than that. She thought everybody in the whole wide world was obligated to rearrange their lives to avoid doing anything that ran even a miniscule chance of offending her. That included reading the wrong books, seeing the wrong movies, wearing the wrong clothes, worshiping the wrong God, enjoying the wrong kind of sex, learning the wrong kind of knowledge, thinking the wrong kind of thoughts, and – most importantly, for our narrative’s sake – making music with the wrong kind of instruments. Nancy had spent her entire adult life pitilessly crusading against the right of anybody anywhere within her line of assault, to have even a thimble’s worth of fun without her approval. And because there were unfortunately all too many people running around who were (except for the regrettable crowbar-shaped nose) exactly like her, and were willing to support her in her various crusades, she was much more successful than she deserved to be. Before long, people who enjoyed things she didn’t begin wearing a hunted, apprehensive look similar to that worn by the lead cow entering the slaughterhouse."

"Life with too many miracles is just another form of chaos."

"“Any messages?” Oscin said, “Just a lot of people dreading whatever you plan to do next.”"

"Talent’s cheap…historically, one of the cheapest things you can buy. And considering the sheer amount of angst you carry around on your back, you need it. After all, angst from a Talented person is fascinating; angst from a Common Everyday Nobody is just an annoyance."

"Management’s never been interested in really doing the job, not at any point in human history. Management’s true agenda has always been making things more pleasant for Management."

"Assassination is just diplomacy by other means."

"Human bureaucracies, and most alien ones, are slow by design, their response times slowed to a crawl despite all the technologies we employ to make their progress visible to the naked eye. That’s because they’re still subject to all the delays native to organic life: the mistakes, indecision, the malice, the covering of asses, and the reluctance to transmit even the most urgent message until after a leisurely break for lunch."

"“What do you think about their position? Do you think it’s right for sentient creatures to be owned?” He emitted a short, cynical laugh, driven by the kind of anger that drives entire lives. “We’re all owned, Counselor. It’s just a matter of choosing who holds the deed.”"

"“Are you refusing a direct order?” “Tell me to die for no good reason and I’ll do more than refuse, I’ll shove the order up your ass.”"

"Today, Henry goes back to London. Today, Alex goes back to the campaign trail. They have to figure out how to do this for real now, how to love each other in plain sight. Alex thinks they're up for it."

"Shaan lookes like he hasn't slept in thirty-six hours. Well, he looks perfectly composed and groomed, but the tag is sticking out of his sweater and the strong smell of whiskey is emanating from his tea. Next to him, in the back of the incognito van they're taking to Buckingham Palace, Zahra has her arms folded resolutely. The engagement ring on her left hand glints in the muted London morning. "So, uh," Alex attempts. "Are you two in a fight now?" Zahra looks at him. "No. Why would you think that?" "Oh. I just thought because-" "It's fine," Shaan says, still typing on his iPhone. "This is why we set rules about the personal-slash-professional lines at the outset of this relationship. It works for us." "If you want a fight, you should have seen it when I found out he had known about you two all along," Zahra says. "Why do you think I got a rock this big?" "It usually works for us," Shaan amends. "Yep," Zahra agrees. "Plus, we banged it out last night." Without looking up, Shaan meets her hand in a high five."

"There are no fireworks out here, no music, no confetti. Just sleeping, single-family homes, TVs switched off. Just a house where Alex grew up, where he saw Henry's picture in a magazine and felt a flicker of something, a start. "Hey," Alex says. Henry turns back to him, his eyes silver in the wash of the streetlight. "We won." Henry takes his hand, one corner of his mouth tugging gently upward. "Yeah. We won." Alex reaches down into the front of his dress shirt and finds the chain with his fingers, pulls it out carefully. The ring, the key. Under winter clouds, victorious, he unlocks the door."

"Get some shoes, we're running," Zahra tells him. "Priority one is damage control, not feelings. He grabs a pair of sneakers, and they take off while he's still pulling them on, running west. His brain is struggling to keep up, running through about five thousand possible ways this could go, imagining himself ten years down the road being frozen out of Congress, plummeting approval ratings, Henry's name being scratched off the line of succession, his mother losing reelection on a swing state's disapproval of him. He's so screwed, and he can't even decide who to be the angriest with, himself or the Mail or the monarchy or the whole stupid country. He nearly crashes into Zahra's back as she skids to a stop in front of a door. He pushes the door open, and the whole room goes silent. His mother stares at him from the head of the table and says flatly, "Out." At first he thinks she's talking to him, but she cuts her eyes down to the people around the table with her. "Was I not clear? Everyone, out, now," she says. "I need to talk to my son."

"Well. It will matter, you know. It will always matter."

"You listen to me," she says. Her jaw is set, ironclad. It's the game face he's seen her use to stare down Congress, to cow autocrats. Her grip on his hand is steady and strong. He wonders, half-hysterically, if this is how it felt to charge into war under Washington. "I am your mother. I was your mother before I was ever the president, and I'll be your mother long after, to the day they put me in the ground and beyond this earth. You are my child. So, if you're serious about this, I'll back your play." Alex is silent. But the debates, he thinks. But the general. Her gaze is hard. He knows better than to say either of those things. She'll handle it. "So," she says, "Do you feel forever about him?" And there's no room left to agonize over it, nothing left to do but say the thing he's known all along. "Yeah," he says, "I do." Ellen Claremont exhales slowly, and she grins a small, secret grin, the crooked, flattering one she never uses in public, the one he knows best from when he was a kid around her knees in a small kitchen in Travis County. "Then, fuck it."

"Go outside, stay safe, be gay. Have a Shiner on me."

"I was hoping you two would start talking dirty," Pez says. "Please, do go on." "I don't think you could keep up, Pez," Alex tells him. "Oh really?" The picture returns to Pez. "What if I put my co-" "Pez," comes the sound of Henry's voice, and a hand with a signet ring on the smallest finger covers Pez's mouth. "I beg of you. Alex, what part of 'nothing he cannot do' did you think was worth testing? Honestly, you are going to get us all killed." "That's the goal," Alex says happily. "So what are y'all gonna do today?" Pez frees himself by licking Henry's palm and continues talking. "Frolic naked in the hills, frighten the sheep, return to the house for the usual: tea, biscuits, casting ourselves upon the Thighmaster of love to moan about Claremont-Diaz siblings, which has become tragically one-sided since Henry took up with you. It used to be all bottles of cognac and shared malaise and 'When will they notice us'-" "Don't tell him that!" "-and now I just ask Henry, 'What is your secret?' And he says, 'I insult Alex all the time and that seems to work.'" "I will turn this car around."

"Even before Alex's parents split, they both had a habit of calling him by the other's last name when he exhibited particular traits. They still do. When he runs his mouth off to the press, his mom calls him into her office and says, "Get your shit together, Diaz." When his hard-headedness gets him stuck, his dad texts him, "Let it go, Claremont.""

"All in all, finals come and go with much less fanfare than Alex imagined. It's a week of cramming and presentations and the usual amount of all-nighters, and it's over. The whole college thing in general went by like that. He didn't really have the experiences everyone else has, always isolated by fame or harangued by security. He never got a stamp on his forehead on his twenty-first birthday at the Tombs, never jumped in Dahlgren Fountain. Sometimes it's like he barely went to Georgetown, merely powered through a series of lectures that happened to be in the same geographical area."