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And Since We Don’t Just Forget Things Because They Don’t Matter But Also Forget Things Because They Matter Too Much Because Each Of Us Remembers And Forgets In A Pattern Whose Labyrinthine Windings Are An Identification Mark No Less Distinctive Than A Fingerprintit’s No Wonder That The Shards Of Reality One Person Will Cherish As A Biography Can Seem To Someone Else Who, Say, Happened To Have Eaten Some Ten Thousand Dinners At The Very Same Kitchen Table, To Be A Willful Excursion Into Mythomania

-Philip Roth

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And Since We Don’t

Philip Roth

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And Since We Don’t Just Forget Things Because They Don’t Matter But Also Forget Things Because They Matter Too Much Because Each Of Us Remembers And Forgets In A Pattern Whose Labyrinthine Windings Are An Identification Mark No Less Distinctive Than A Fingerprintit’s No Wonder That The Shards Of Reality One Person Will Cherish As A Biography Can Seem To Someone Else Who, Say, Happened To Have Eaten Some Ten Thousand Dinners At The Very Same Kitchen Table, To Be A Willful Excursion Into Mythomania

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Satire Is Moral Outrage Transformed Into Comic Art.

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I Was Gushing And I Knew It. I Surprised Myself With My Eagerness To Please, Felt Myself Saying Too Much, Explaining Too Much, Overinvolved And Overexcited In The Way You Are When You're A Kid And You Think You've Found A Soul Mate In The New Boy Down The Street And You Feel Yourself Drawn By The Force Of The Courtship And So Act As You Don't Normally Do And A Lot More Openly Than You May Even Want To.

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You Asked If I Thought My Fiction Had Changed Anything In The Culture And The Answer Is No. Sure, There's Been Some Scandal, But People Are Scandalized All The Time; It's A Way Of Life For Them. It Doesn't Mean A Thing. If You Ask If I Want My Fiction To Change Anything In The Culture, The Answer Is Still No. What I Want Is To Possess My Readers While They Are Reading My Book If I Can, To Possess Them In Ways That Other Writers Don't. Then Let Them Return, Just As They Were, To A World Where Everybody Else Is Working To Change, Persuade, Tempt, And Control Them.

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Everybody Who Flashed The Signs Of Loyalty He Took To Be Loyal. Everybody Who Flashed The Signs Of Intelligence He Took To Be Intelligent. And So He Had Failed To See Into His Daughter, Failed To See Into His Wife, Failed To See Into His One And Only Mistress—probably Had Never Even Begun To See Into Himself

Being In The Dark From Sentence To Sentence Is What Convinces Me To Go On.

The Only Obsession Everyone Wants: 'love.' People Think That In Falling In Love They Make Themselves Whole? The Platonic Union Of Souls? I Think Otherwise. I Think You're Whole Before You Begin. And The Love Fractures You. You're Whole, And Then You're Cracked Open.

Should You Protect Profits? Yes. But Run For The Hills? No.

And As He Spoke, I Was Thinking, 'the Kind Of Stories That People Turn Life Into, The Kind Of Lives People Turn Stories Into.

Any Satirist Writing A Futuristic Novel Who Had Imagined A President Reagan During The Eisenhower Years Would Have Been Accused Of Perpetrating A Piece Of Crude, Contemptible, Adolescent, Anti-american Wickedness, When, In Fact, He Would Have Succeeded, As Prophetic Sentry, Where Orwell Failed.

A Father For Whom Everything Is An Unshakable Duty, For Whom There Is A Right Way And A Wrong Way And Nothing In Between, A Father Whose Compound Of Ambitions, Biases, And Beliefs Is So Unruffled By Careful Thinking That He Isn’t As Easy To Escape From As He Seems. Limited Men With Limitless Energy; Men Quick To Be Friendly And Quick To Be Fed Up; Men For Whom The Most Serious Thing In Life Is To Keep Going Despite Everything. And We Were Their Sons. It Was Our Job To Love Them.

There's Something Every Woman Wants, And That's A Man To Blame.

We Live In An Age In Which The Imagination Of The Novelist Is Helpless Against What He Knows He Is Going To Read In Tomorrow's Newspaper.

You Take Off Your Clothes And You're In Bed With Somebody, And That Is Indeed Where Whatever You've Concealed, Your Particularity, Whatever It May Be, However Encrypted, Is Going To Be Found Out, And That's What All The Shyness Is All About And What Everybody Fears.

Because That Is When You Love Somebody - When You See Them Being Game In The Face Of The Worst. Not Courageous. Not Heroic. Just Game.

Oh, To Be A Center Fielder, A Center Fielder- And Nothing More

Center Fielders

Everybody Else Is Working To Change, Persuade, Tempt And Control Them. The Best Readers Come To Fiction To Be Free Of All That Noise.

For Discipline Is Imposed Not Just On Oneself But On Those In One's Orbit.

The Secret To Living In The Rush Of The World With A Minimum Of Pain Is To Get As Many People As Possible To String Along With Your Delusions.

Doctor, I Had Never Had Anybody Like Her In My Life, She Was The Fulfillment Of My Most Lascivious Adolescent Dreams– But Marry Her, Can She Be Serious? You See, For All Her Preening And Perfumes, She Has A Very Low Opinion Of Herself, And Simultaneously– And Here Is The Source Of Much Of Our Trouble-a Ridiculously High Opinion Of Me. And Simultaneously, A Very Low Opinion Of Me! She Is One Confused Monkey, And, I'm Afraid, Not Too Very Bright.

The Horror Of Being Caged Has Lost Its Thrill.

Sex Is All The Enchantment Required. Do Men Find Women So Enchanting Once The Sex Is Taken Out? Does Anyone Find Anyone That Enchanting Unless They Have Sexual Business With Them? Who Else Are You Enchanted By? Nobody.

The Fact Remains That Getting People Right Is Not What Living Is All About Anyway. It's Getting Them Wrong That Is Living, Getting Them Wrong And Wrong And Wrong And Then, On Careful Reconsideration, Getting Them Wrong Again. That's How We Know We're Alive: We're Wrong.

And Since We Don’t Just Forget Things Because They Don’t Matter But Also Forget Things Because They Matter Too Much Because Each Of Us Remembers And Forgets In A Pattern Whose Labyrinthine Windings Are An Identification Mark No Less Distinctive Than A Fingerprintit’s No Wonder That The Shards Of Reality One Person Will Cherish As A Biography Can Seem To Someone Else Who, Say, Happened To Have Eaten Some Ten Thousand Dinners At The Very Same Kitchen Table, To Be A Willful Excursion Into Mythomania

The Pleasure Isn't In Owning The Person. The Pleasure Is This. Having Another Contender In The Room With You.

For A Pure Sense Of Being Tumultuously Alive, You Can't Beat The Nasty Side Of Existence.

Sheer Playfulness And Deadly Seriousness Are My Closest Friends.

Closest Friends

I Work Most Days And If You Work Most Days And You Get At Least A Page Done A Day, Then At The End Of The Year You Have 365. So The Pages Accumulate And Then I Publish The Books.

I Don't Wish To Be A Slave Any Longer To The Stringent Exigencies Of Literature.

What I Would Really Love To Happen To Me Would Be If I Came Upon An Idea That Would Keep Me Busy Until I Die So I Wouldn't Have To Go Through The Business Of Thinking Up A New Book. But I Wouldn't Mind Writing A Long Book Which Is Going To Occupy Me For The Rest Of My Life.

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. Then I Have Tea And Turn The New Sentence Around. Then I Read The Two Sentences Over And Turn Them Both Around. Then I Lie Down On My Sofa And Think. Then I Get Up And Throw Them Out And Start From The Beginning.

This Is What You Know About Someone You Have To Hate: He Charges You With His Crime And Castigates Himself In You.

Too Late, But I Understand. That We Don't Perish Of Understanding Everything Too Late, That Is A Miracle. But We Do Perish Of That -- Of Just That.

World War Iii Will Be Triggered Off Not By Suppressed Nationalists Seeking Political Independence, As Happened The First Time Around When The Serbs At Sarajevo Shot The Heir To The Austrian Throne, But By Some Semiliterate, Whacked-out "loner" Who Lobs A Rocket Into A Nuclear Arsenal In Order To Impress Brooke Shields.

Like All Enjoyable Things, You See, It Has Unenjoyable Parts To It.

The Legend Engraved On The Face Of The Jewish Nickel- On The Body Of Every Jewish Child!- Not In God We Trust, But Someday You'll Be A Parent And You'll Know What It's Like.

It's Amazing How Much Punishment We Can Take.

That Can Happen When People Die, The Argument With Them Drops Away And People So Flawed While They Were Drawing Breath That At Times They Were All But Unbearable Now Assert Themselves In The Most Appealing Way, And What Was Least To Your Liking The Day Before Yesterday Becomes In The Limousine Behind The Hearse A Cause Not Only For Sympathetic Amusement But For Admiration

Unless One Is Inordinately Fond Of Subordination, One Is Always At War.

Seeing Is Believing And Believing Is Knowing And Knowing Beats Unknowing And The Unknown.

I Don’t Ask Writers About Their Work Habits. I Really Don’t Care. Joyce Carol Oates Says Somewhere That When Writers Ask Each Other What Time They Start Working And When They Finish And How Much Time They Take For Lunch, They’re Actually Trying To Find Out, "is He As Crazy As I Am?" I Don’t Need That Question Answered.

I’m Interested In What People Do With The Chaos In Their Lives And How They Respond To It, And Simultaneously What They Do With What They Feel Like Are Limitations. If They Push Against These Limitations, Will They Wind Up In The Realm Of Chaos, Or Will They Push Against Limitations And Wind Up In The World Of Freedom?

You Cannot Observe People Through An Ideology. Your Ideology Observes For You.

When I Was A Child... I Was Watching A Snowstorm, And Hopefully Asked, 'momma, Do We Believe In Winter?'

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Elizabeth Bibesco

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