Stephen’s Collection
The Breaking Point
From The Breaking Point:
– At the same time, things were changing in the friendship of America’s two most promising young writers. Without knowing quite how, they too were moving toward some sort of breaking point. When it came at last, it wasn’t exactly over career. And it wasn’t exactly over politics. And it wasn’t exactly over sex, either. Yet come it did, and when it did it was somehow about every one of those things, each merging into the other. The breaking point between Hem and Dos came one day in the early spring of 1937,… –
READ FULL PASSAGE | BUY FROM AMAZON
Double Lives
From The Breaking Point:
– The man who stepped off the Moscow train at the Gare du Nord was perfection composed of every improbability, the highest improbability of all being that with his ravaged face and tender smile this sometime dilettante, this consort of Dietrich and friend of Kafka, this playboy of the Berlin theatre was destined to become one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of espionage. –
READ FULL PASSAGE | BUY FROM AMAZON
Stargazer: The Life, World & Films of Andy Warhol
From Stargazer:
– The vie Boheme is a mode of living that modernism retained from the romantic movement. In America its capital is certainly New York, and its gradations are complex. For purposes of discussion let us neatly suggest that all Bohemia, like Gaul, is divided into three parts. Let us call those parts Upper Bohemia, Middle Bohemia, and Lower Bohemia. –
READ FULL PASSAGE | BUY FROM AMAZON
Modern Library Writer’s Workshop
From Modern Library Writer’s Workshop:
– The only way to begin is to begin, and begin right now. If you like, begin the minute you finish reading this paragraph. For sure, begin before you finish reading this book. I have no doubt the day is coming when you will be wiser or better informed or more highly skilled than you are now, but you will never be more ready to begin writing than you are right this minute. The time has come. You already know, more or less, what a good story looks like. You’ve already got in mind some human situation that matters to you. –
READ FULL PASSAGE | BUY FROM AMAZON
The Bachelor’s Bride
A personal favorite passage from The Bachelor’s Bride. In it, the young hero, a graduate student, meets his hero, Marcel Duchamp:
– “Well, Mr Phillips,” Duchamp extended his thin hand toward me, “My good friend Mel Dworkin tells me you are foolish enough to be trying to understand me. Such ambition!”
I stepped forward and took his handshake with what — given his seated position—may have slightly resembled a bow.
“Well sir, that is true. I am trying.”
I was thinking. One of the giants. One of the visionary company!
“And have you?” he asked.
“Sir? Have I what?”
“Have you understood me?”
“Well, sir, I have to admit that I have not yet quite accomplished that. But I am on the case, I am working very hard.”
“Oh, that sounds dreadful,” Duchamp was fast. “I’ve always hated hard work myself. I’ve done a very great deal in my life just to avoid work, any kind of work. But this understanding me, it may not be so simple, you know.” –