"One’s story isn’t a skin to be shed— it’s inescapable, one’s body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that’s at on..."
- Philip Roth
"I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. ..."
"Writting turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get ir right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't compl..."
"A man who's discontents were barely known to himself, awakening in middle age to the horror of self-reflection."
"This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you."
"Simple was never that simple. Still, the self-questioning did take some time to reach him. And if there's anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it's self-questioning coming to..."
"Well, good Christ, how was I supposed to know all that, Hannah? Who looks into the fine points when he's hungry? I'm eight years old and chocolate pudding happens to get me hot. All I have to do is se..."
"Within five minutes of leaving the reunion, I'd undone the double wrapping and eaten all six rugelach, each a snail of sugar-dusted pastry dough, the cinnamon-lined chambers microscopically studded wi..."
"Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind."
"I understood that people are trying to transform themselves all the time: the universal urge to be otherwise. So as not to look as they look, sound as they sound, be treated as they are treated, suffe..."