Philip Roth

In Israel it’s enough to live—you don’t have to do anything else and you go to bed exhausted. Have you ever noticed that Jews shout? Even one ear is more than you need.

Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?

The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses.

[A] life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

Writing the last page of a book was as close as he’d ever come to sublimity, and that hadn’t happened in four years.

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.

When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she’s not around, other women must do. Zuckerman was making do with four other women.

Following each divorce, he discovered anew that unmarried a man had to take women places: out to restaurants, for walks in the park, to museums and the opera and the movies—not only had to go to the movies but afterwards had to discuss them.

Zuckerman, sucker though he was for seriousness, was still not going to be drawn into a discussion about agents and editors. If ever there was a reason for an American writer to seek asylum in Red China, it would be to put ten thousand miles between himself and those discussions.

There’s something even/ woman wants, and that’s a man to blame.

Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown.

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year- old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die.

He’s got an option on the Six-Day War, for a musical. Yul Brynner is already as good as signed to star as Dayan.

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.

The eulogist spoke charmingly, without a trace of sadness, almost as though he were preparing to present the corpse in the casket with a large check rather than to usher it on to the crematorium.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

The sooner we get rid of losing, the happier everyone will be.

Doctor, my doctor, what do you say, LET’S g PUT THE ID BACK IN YID!