[Andre Jute]

Howard Roark from THE FOUNTAINHEADby Ayn Rand standing naked on the cliff over the river.

Haven't read it since I was a boy, but that has stayed with me.

In Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED, I can't remember the name of the female lead character (Dagny?) but there's a scene where she's travelling on a train, sitting with her feet on the opposite bench, and I remember the phrase about the "blade-like elegance" of her legs. (As a writer, I won't ask for more than that people decades later remember a throwaway phrase from me so vividly.)

People who say Rand wasn't a good writer are usually reacting to her politics (I did too, though not in the way they do: I became a Chicago School economist) but she was a perfectly serviceable writer in her political works, and in her earliest pieces, ANTHEM, about collectivism taken to its logical absurdity, and WE THE LIVING, about the brutalities and immoralities of the Russian Revolution, she rose to poetry.

 

[Andre Jute]

Nick when he meets Daisy for the first time in Gatsby. The wind catching and floating Daisy and Jordan from the couch. Beautiful.

I haven't read The Great Gatsby for a hundred years (a prime example of how education turns even a poet off the language!), but I remember the infinitely sad moment with Daisy in Gatsby's dressing room, whirling up a storm of his shirts, her last moment of abandon as she resigns herself to life with her dull, brutish husband.

 

[Andre Jute]

It can be a book that you've written as well. Just interested in what sticks in the mind (and why it doesn't seem to for me).

Hell, I can't even remember the names of some of my books, never mind scenes from them. Professional writers move on to new excitements. Scenes from books I'm planning to write are vivid in my mind, but I can't tell you about them, and not for fear of Betsy's cattle prod, but because if I tell you, the excitement will be expended and the scene in the book will be dull.