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Teaching ... Particularly In The 1990s, Teaching What Is Far And Away The Dumbest Generation In American History, Is The Same As Walking Up Broadway In Manhattan Talking To Yourself, Except Instead Of Eighteen People Who Hear You In The Street Talking To Yourself, They're All In The Room. They Know, Like, Nothing.

-Philip Roth

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Teaching ... Particularly In

Philip Roth

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Teaching ... Particularly In The 1990s, Teaching What Is Far And Away The Dumbest Generation In American History, Is The Same As Walking Up Broadway In Manhattan Talking To Yourself, Except Instead Of Eighteen People Who Hear You In The Street Talking To Yourself, They're All In The Room. They Know, Like, Nothing.

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Each Book Starts From Ashes Really. I Don't Feel That I Have This To Say Or That To Say Or This Story To Tell Or That Story To Tell, But I Want To Be Occupied With The Writing Process While I'm Living.

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

Stop Worrying About Growing Old. And Think About Growing Up.

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

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I Came To New York And In Only Hours, New York Did What It Does To People: Awakened The Possibilities. Hope Breaks Out.

You Have A Conscience, And A Conscience Is A Valuable Attribute, But Not If It Begins To Make You Think You Were To Blame For What Is Far Beyond The Scope Of Your Responsibility.

Teaching ... Particularly In The 1990s, Teaching What Is Far And Away The Dumbest Generation In American History, Is The Same As Walking Up Broadway In Manhattan Talking To Yourself, Except Instead Of Eighteen People Who Hear You In The Street Talking To Yourself, They're All In The Room. They Know, Like, Nothing.

Turned The Wrong Way Around, The Relentless Unforeseen Was What We Schoolchildren Studied In "history", Harmless History, Where Everything Unexpected In Its Own Time Is Chronicled On The Page As Inevitable. The Terror Of The Unforeseen Is What The Science Of History Hides, Turning A Disaster Into An Epic.

People Are Unjust To Anger - It Can Be Enlivening And A Lot Of Fun.

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.

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.

The Terror Of The Unforeseen Is What The Science Of History Hides, Turning A Disaster Into An Epic.

I Haven't Written A Word Of Fiction Since 2009. I Have No Desire To Write Fiction. I Did What I Did And It's Done. There's More To Life Than Writing And Publishing Fiction. There Is Another Way Entirely, Amazed As I Am To Discover It At This Late Date.

When I Have A First Draft, I Have A Floor Under My Feet That I Can Walk On. And Then, Especially With The Help Of The Computer, Rewriting Is So Easy To Do With The Computer, Much Easier Than It Used To Be With The Typewriter. So The Books Go Through Numerous Drafts.

I Cannot And Do Not Live In The World Of Discretion, Not As A Writer, Anyway. I Would Prefer To, I Assure You - It Would Make Life Easier. But Discretion Is, Unfortunately, Not For Novelists.

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.

The Danger With Hatred Is, Once You Start In On It, You Get A Hundred Times More Than You Bargained For. Once You Start, You Can't Stop.

The Hard Part Is, Of Course, The Proximity Of Death. The Number Has No Meaning As Long As You're Fit And Healthy. But You Know That You Only Have So Much Time Left And You Don't Know How Much It Is. It Could Be A Very Short Time.

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 Thought Of The Novelist Lies Not In The Remarks Of His Characters Or Even In Their Introspection But In The Plight He Has Invented For His Characters - In The Juxtaposition Of Those Characters And In The Lifelike Ramifications Of The Ensemble They Make: Their Density, Their Substantiality, Their Lived Existence Actualized In All Its Nuanced Particulars, Is In Fact His Thought Metabolized.

Obviously The Facts Are Never Just Coming At You But Are Incorporated By An Imagination That Is Formed By Your Previous Experience. Memories Of The Past Are Not Memories Of Facts But Memories Of Your Imaginings Of The Facts.

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.

If You Read A Novel In More Than Two Weeks, You Don't Read The Novel Really.

Writing Turns You Into Somebody Who's Always Wrong. The Illusion That You May Get It Right Someday Is The Perversity That Draws You On. What Else Could? As Pathological Phenomena Go, It Doesn't Completely Wreck Your Life.

As For Himself, However Hateful Life Was, It Was Hateful In A Home And Not In The Gutter. Many Americans Hated Their Homes. The Number Of Homeless In America Couldn't Touch The Number Of Americans Who Had Homes And Families And Hated The Whole Thing.

Nothing Has A More Sinister Effect On Art Than The Artist's Desire To Prove That He's Good. The Terrible Temptation Of Idealism! You Must Achieve Mastery Over Your Idealism, Over Your Virtue As Well As Over Your Vice, Aesthetic Mastery Over Everything That Drives You To Write In The First Place - Your Outrage, Your Politics, Your Grief, Your Love!

Fear Presides Over These Memories, A Perpetual Fear.of Course No Childhood Is Without Its Terrors, Yet I Wonder If I Would Have Been A Less Frightened Boy If Lindbergh Hadn't Been President Or If I Hadn't Been The Offspring Of Jews.

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A Life Of Writing Books Is A Trying Adventure In Which You Cannot Find Out Where You Are Unless You Lose Your Way.

Doctor Doctor, What Do You Say, Lets Put The Id Back In Yid

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I'm An Obama Supporter. And If You're An Obama Supporter That Means You Had A Hard Time During The Bush Years.

I Would Be Wonderful With A 100-year Moratorium On Literature Talk, If You Shut Down All Literature Departments, Close The Book Reviews, Ban The Critics. The Readers Should Be Alone With The Books, And If Anyone Dared To Say Anything About Them, They Would Be Shot Or Imprisoned Right On The Spot. Yes, Shot. A 100-year Moratorium On Insufferable Literary Talk. You Should Let People Fight With The Books On Their Own And Rediscover What They Are And What They Are Not. Anything Other Than This Talk.

Nothing Lasts And Yet Nothing Passes Either, And Nothing Passes Just Because Nothing Lasts.

Everyone Becomes A Part Of History Whether They Like It Or Not And Whether They Know It Or Not.

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.

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.

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I Kept Waiting For Him To Lay Bare Something More Than This Pointed Unobjectionableness, But All That Rose To The Surface Was More Surface

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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.

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The Ordeal Is Part Of The Commitment" Esquire Interview 10/10

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I Am Marked Like A Road Map From Head To Toe With My Repressions. You Can Travel The Length And Breadth Of My Body Over Superhighways Of Shame And Inhibition And Fear.

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Just Like Those Who Are Incurably Ill, The Aged Know Everything About Their Dying Except Exactly When.

Each Book Starts From Ashes.

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

Memories Of The Past Are Not Memories Of Facts But Memories Of Your Imaginings Of The Facts.

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

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

When The Whole World Doesn't Believe In God, It'll Be A Great Place.

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Don't Judge It. Just Write It. Don't Judge It. It's Not For You To Judge It.

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

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One Either Imposes One's Ideas Or One Is Imposed On.

There Were Many Hours When I Never Quite Know How I'd Gotten There Or Why I Stayed.

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.

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Life Is Just A Short Period Of Time In Which You Are Alive.

The Only Way To Have A Funeral Is To Invite Everyone Who Ever Knew The Person And Just Wait For The Accident To Happen-somebody Who Comes In Out Of The Blue And Says The Truth. Everything Else Is Table Manners.

I Think I Write Or Publish As Much As I Do Because I Can Bear Being Without A Book To Work On.

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Questions And Answers

I Turn Sentences Around. That's My Life. I Write A Sentence And Then I Turn It Around. Then I Look At It And Turn It Around Again.

He Was No More, Freed From Being, Entering Into Nowhere Without Even Knowing It. Just As He'd Feared From The Start.

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Maybe The Best Thing Would Be To Forget Being Right Or Wrong About People And Just Go Along For The Ride. But If You Can Do That -- Well, Lucky You.

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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.

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

The Tragedy Of The Man Not Set Up For Tragedy ? That Is Every Man?s Tragedy.

How Easy Life Is When It's Easy, And How Hard When It's Hard.

For Someone Whose Roots In America Were Strong But Only Inches Deep, And Who Had No Experience, Such As A Catholic Child Might, Of An Awesome Hierarchy That Was Real And Felt, Baseball Was A Kind Of Secular Church That Reached Into Every Class And Region Of The Nation And Bound Millions Upon Millions Of Us Together In Common Concerns, Loyalties, Rituals, Enthusiasms, And Antagonisms. Baseball Made Me Understand What Patriotism Was About, At Its Best.

The Question To Ask About The Writer Isn't 'why Does He Behave So Badly?' But 'what Does He Gain By Wearing This Mask?

In My Childhood I Led The Life Of A Sage, When I Grew Up I Started Climbing Trees

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.

American Society [...] Not Only Sanctions Gross And Unfair Relations Among Men, But It Encourages Them. Now, Can That Be Denied? No. Rivalry, Competition, Envy, Jealousy, All That Is Malignant In Human Character Is Nourished By The System. Possession, Money, Property--on Such Corrupt Standards As These Do You People Measure Happiness And Success.

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When He Is Sick, Every Man Wants His Mother.

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Sooner Or Later

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

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He Had Learned The Worst Lesson That Life Can Teach - That It Makes No Sense.

I Wouldn't Mind Writing A Long Book Which Is Going To Occupy Me For The Rest Of My Life.

We Leave A Stain, We Leave A Trail, We Leave Our Imprint. Impurity, Cruelty, Abuse, Error, Excrement, Semen - There’s No Other Way To Be Here. Nothing To Do With Disobedience. Nothing To Do With Grace Or Salvation Or Redemption. It’s In Everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The Stain That Is There Before Its Mark.

To Become A Celebrity Is To Become A Brand Name. There Is Ivory Soap, Rice Krispies, And Philip Roth. Ivory Is The Soap That Floats; Rice Krispies The Breakfast Cereal That Goes Snap-crackle-pop; Philip Roth The Jew Who Masturbates With A Piece Of Liver.

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

You Can No More Make Someone Tell The Truth Than You Can Force Someone To Love You.

Telling The Truth

What I Have In Mind When I Start To Write Could Fit Inside An Acorn-an Acorn, Moreover, That Rarely If Ever Grows Into An Oak. Write Fiction And You Relinquish Reason. You Start With An Acorn And You End Up With A Mackerel.

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.

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

Center Fielders

Nothing Has A More Sinister Effect On Art Than The Artist's Desire To Prove That He's Good. The Terrible Temptation Of Idealism!

People Were Standing Up Everywhere Shouting, "this Is Me! This Is Me!" Every Time You Looked At Them They Stood Up And Told You Who They Were, And The Truth Of It Was That They Had No More Idea Who Or What They Were Than He Had. They Believed Their Flashing Signs, Too. They Ought To Be Standing Up And Shouting, "this Isn't Me! This Isn't Me!" They Would If They Had Any Decency. "this Isn't Me!" Then You Might Know How To Proceed Through The Flashing Bullshit Of This World.

Satire Is Moral Outrage Transformed Into Comic Art.

All I Can Tell You With Certainty Is That I, For One, Have No Self, And That I Am Unwilling Or Unable To Perpetrate Upon Myself The Joke Of A Self. What I Have Instead Is A Variety Of Impersonations I Can Do, And Not Only Of Myself - A Troupe Of Players That I Have Internalised, A Permanent Company Of Actors That I Can Call Upon When A Self Is Required. I Am A Theater And Nothing More Than A Theater.

A Jew Without Jews, Without Judaism, Without Zionism, Without Jewishness, Without A Temple Or An Army Or Even A Pistol, A Jew Clearly Without A Home, Just The Object Itself, Like A Glass Or An Apple.

You Put Too Much Stock In Human Intelligence, It Doesn't Annihilate Human Nature.

Dreams? If Only They Had Been! But I Don't Need Dreams, Doctor, That's Why I Hardly Have Them—because I Have This Life Instead. With Me It All Happens In Broad Daylight!

A Writer Has To Be Driven Crazy To Help Him To See. A Writer Needs His Poisons.

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.

When He [joe Lewis] Was Asked Upon His Retirement About His Long Career, Joe Sweetly Summed It Up In Just Ten Words. 'i Did The Best I Could With What I Had'.

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; The Trick To Living Alone Up Here, Away From All Agitating Entanglements, Allurements, And Expectations, Apart Especially From One's Own Intensity, Is To Organize The Silence, To Think Of Its Mountaintop Plenitude As Capital, Silence As Wealth Exponentially Increasing. The Encircling Silence As Your Chosen Source Of Advantage And Your Only Intimate.

I Do Not Say Correct Or Savory. I Do Not Say Seemly Or Even Natural. I Say Serious. Sensationally Serious. Unspeakably Serious. Solemnly, Recklessly, Blissfully Serious.

A Jewish Man With Parents Alive Is A Fifteen-year-old Boy, And Will Remain A Fifteen-year-old Boy Until They Die!

The Horror Of Being Caged Has Lost Its Thrill.

I Often Have To Write A Hundred Pages Or More Before There's A Paragraph That's Alive.

Only In America, Rabbi Golden, Do These Peasants, Our Mothers, Get Their Hair Dyed Platinum At The Age Of Sixty, And Walk Up And Down Collins Avenue In Florida In Pedalpushers And Mink Stoles - And With Opinions On Every Subject Under The Sun. It Isn't Their Fault They Were Given A Gift Like Speech - Look, If Cows Could Talk, They Would Say Things Just As Idiotic.

It's Best To Give While Your Hand Is Still Warm.

Let's Hope The First Comes First.

There’s No Remaking Reality... Just Take It As It Comes. Hold Your Ground And Take It As It Comes. There’s No Other Way.

I Write Fiction And I'm Told It's Autobiography, I Write Autobiography And I'm Told It's Fiction, So Since I'm So Dim And They're So Smart, Let Them Decide What It Is Or It Isn't.

To Read A Novel Requires A Certain Kind Of Concentration, Focus, Devotion To The Reading. If You Read A Novel In More Than Two Weeks, You Don't Read The Novel Really.

When You Publish A Book, It's The World's Book. The World Edits It.

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.

I Have A Slogan I Use When I Get Anxious Writing, Which Happens Quite A Bit: ‘the Ordeal Is Part Of The Commitment.’ It’s One Of My Mantras. It Makes A Lot Of Things Doable.

Nothing Bad Can Happen To A Writer. Everything Is Material.

The Book Can't Compete With The Screen. It Couldn't Compete Beginning With The Movie Screen. It Couldn't Compete With The Television Screen And It Can't Compete With The Computer Screen I Don't Think. And Now We Have All Those Screens So Against All Those Screens I Think The Book Can't Measure Up.

Eventually The Writing Takes Time. What I Want To Do Is Get The Story Down And I Want To Know What Happens As I Write My Way Into The Knowledge Of The Story.

It's Absolutely Fantastic. When I Was A Kid, My Father Was Always Trying To Tell Me How To Be A Man, And He Said To Me, I Was Maybe 9, And He Said To Me, 'philip, Whenever You Take A Nap, Take Your Clothes Off, Put A Blanket On You, And You're Going To Sleep Better.' Well, As With Everything, He Was Right. ... Then The Best Part Of It Is That When You Wake Up, For The First 15 Seconds, You Have No Idea Where You Are. You're Just Alive. That's All You Know. And It's Bliss, It's Absolute Bliss.

You Don't Want To Repeat Yourself For One. You Don't Want To Fall Into The Clichés For Another. And You Don't Want To Be Licentious Really. You Want To Be Descriptive, If You Can Be. And You're Not Setting Out To Arouse Anybody.

--nor Had I Understood Til Then How The Shameless Vanity Of Utter Fools Can So Strongly Determine The Fate Of Others

It's Amazing How Much Punishment We Can Take.

Everything Dictated Silence And Self-control But I Couldn't Restrain Myself And Spoke My Mind.

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Armistead Maupin

Fannie Lou Hamer

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