Past Imperfect

What does she do?" "She's a producer." Of course, in Los Angeles this doesn't mean much more than "she's a member of the human race.

Los Angeles is a town where status is all and status is only given to success. Dukes and millionaires and playboys by the dozen may arrive and be glad-handed for a time, but they are unwise if they choose to live there because the town is, perhaps even creditably, committed to recognising only professional success, and nothing else, to be of lasting value. The burdensome obligation imposed on all its inhabitants is therefore to present themselves as successes, because otherwise they forfeit their right to respect in that environment ... There is no place in that town for the "interesting failure" or for anyone who is not determined on a life that will be shaped in a upward-heading curve.

Especially as I was an old friend, or at least I was a person she had known for a long time, which after a certain point is almost the same thing...

When young and clever men are angry, they either explode or achieve great things.

In my defence I can only say that her past, too, like mine, like everyone's in fact, was a locked box. Occasionally we allow people a peep, but generally only at the top level. The darker streams of our memories we negotiate alone.

Why do we spend so much of our lives making blameless people unhappy?

Education. Experience. Or are they the same thing?

She said I'd poison his mind and make him a fascist. I said she'd poison his body and make him an addict.

He was one of those who manage to combine almost total failure with breathtaking arrogance

This phenomenon, where the losers of a revolution try to demonstrate their support for, and approval of, the changes that have destroyed them, always fascinates me.

Very few Englishmen ever ask a woman anything about themselves. They choose instead to lecture their dinner neighbors on a new and better route to the M5, or to praise their own professional achievements. So is a man does express any curiosity about a woman sitting next to him, about her feelings, about the life she is leading, she will generally tell him anything he cares to know.

Nor should they be, but everyone needs to feel they're part of something worthwhile. That, in the last analysis, their life has some meaning in a larger context. The questions is what am I part of? What have I done?

It is a fact that in the brutal periods of history, what changes is not the cutting edge of every new market, or the ambition that drives a new factory owner or a new hostess, or a new conquest from the performing stage, or a new triumph in a political drawing room. All that is constant. It is the level of coasting that goes on behind the bright and harsh façade that is different. In a gentle era – and my youth was passed in a fairly gentle era – people of little ability could drift by in every class, at every level of society. Jobs were found for them. Homes were arranged. Someone’s uncle sorted it out. Someone’s mother put in a word. But when things get tough, when, as now, the prizes are bigger but the going is rougher, the weaklings are elbowed aside until they fall back and slip over the cliff. Unskilled workers or stupid landowners alike, they are crushed by a system they cannot master and find themselves ejected on to the roadside

They say one sign of growing old is that the past becomes more real than the present and already I can feel the fingers of those lost decades closing their grip round my imagination, making more recent memory seem somehow greyer and less bright.

There is a religion somewhere in the world that believes we all die twice; once in the normal way and the second time when the last person who really knew us dies, so one’s living memory is gone from the earth.

Dabei steckte mir nach meiner traurigen Jugend das altbekannte, für die späte Pubertät so typische Gefühlsgemisch aus Stolz und Verzweiflung noch tief in den Knochen, wenn man sich hochnäsig für etwas Besseres hält, aber gleichzeitig an sozialer Paranoia leidet.