« How many works of the imagination have been goaded into life by envy of an untalented contemporary’s success? More, I would wager, than by any sight of talent rewarded. As I watched Max go, I was seized by a trembling, a trembling which mixed both rage and joy, for there, prancing away from me, inciting my envy, was a two-legged proof positive that I could and, by God, I would, write a far, far better book than Max Bronstein ever dreamed of. I saw my unfinished novel as a banked fire which needed only this flame of rage and resentment to spark it into genius. My life in America has been caught up in marriage, in parenthood, in the pursuit of a wage, in the foolish vanity of the few short stories which I published here. My novel has been subordinated to these dilettantish things. I shall be thirty years old next December. I can no longer coast along on « promise ». Performance is the present imperative. I must be ruthless. I have only one life; I must do something with it. Time, I must find time. »
From An Answer From Limbo, by Brian Moore. A successful novelist, Moore also wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain. He described the exercise as « awful, like washing floors ».
