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You Go To Someone And You Think, 'i'll Tell Him This.' But Why? The Impulse Is That The Telling Is Going To Relieve You. And That's Why You Feel Awful Later--you've Relieved Yourself, And If It Truly Is Tragic And Awful, It's Not Better, It's Worse---the Exhibitionism Inherent To A Confession Has Only Made The Misery Worse.

-Philip Roth

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You Go To Someone

Philip Roth

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You Go To Someone And You Think, 'i'll Tell Him This.' But Why? The Impulse Is That The Telling Is Going To Relieve You. And That's Why You Feel Awful Later--you've Relieved Yourself, And If It Truly Is Tragic And Awful, It's Not Better, It's Worse---the Exhibitionism Inherent To A Confession Has Only Made The Misery Worse.

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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

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

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Fear Tends To Manifest Itself Much More Quickly Than Greed, So Volatile Markets Tend To Be On The Downside. In Up Markets, Volatility Tends To Gradually Decline.

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

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.

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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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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.

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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.

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Sheer Playfulness And Deadly Seriousness Are My Closest Friends.

Closest Friends

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When You Decide 'to Be A Writer,' You Don't Have The Faintest Idea Of What The Work Is Like. When You Begin, You Write Spontaneously Out Of Your Limited Experience Of Both The Unwritten World And The Written World. You're Full Of Naïve Exuberance. 'i Am A Writer!' Rather Like The Excitement Of 'i Have A Lover!' But Working At It Nearly Every Day For Fifty Years Whether It Is Being The Writer Or Being The Lover Turns Out To Be An Extremely Taxing Job And Hardly The Pleasantest Of Human Activities.

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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.

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.

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.

The Best Readers Come To Fiction To Be Free Of ... All That Isn't Fiction.

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

Telling The Truth

There Is Truth And Then Again There Is Truth. For All That The World Is Full Of People Who Go Around Believing They've Got You Or Your Neighbor Figured Out, There Really Is No Bottom To What Is Not Known. The Truth About Us Is Endless. As Are The Lies.

It's Human To Have A Secret, But It's Just As Human To Reveal It Sooner Or Later.

Sooner Or Later

Literature Isn't A Moral Beauty Contest. Its Power Arises From The Authority And Audacity With Which The Impersonation Is Pulled Off; The Belief It Inspires Is What Counts.

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

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

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

The Road To Hell Is Paved With Works-in-progress.

I Think You're A Wonder. You're Beautiful. You're Mature. You Are, I Admit, Vastly More Experienced Than I Am. That's What Threw Me. I Was Thrown. Forgive Me.

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

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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.

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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.

No Matter How Much You Know, No Matter How Much You Think, No Matter How Much You Plot And You Connive And You Plan, You're Not Superior To Sex. It's A Very Risky Game.... It's Sex That Disorders Our Normally Ordered Lives.

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.

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

Is An Intelligent Human Being Likely To Be Much More Than A Large-scale Manufacturer Of Misunderstanding?

When I Have A First Draft, I Have A Floor Under My Feet That I Can Walk On. 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.

Let's Hope The First Comes First.

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

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

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