Only in America ... 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To become a celebrity is to become a brand name. There is Ivory Soap, Rice Krispies, and Philip Roth. Ivory is the soap that float...s; Rice Krispies the breakfast cereal that goes snap-crackle-pop; Philip Roth the Jew who masturbates with a piece of liver.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 th...e 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Circumcision is startling, all right, particularly when performed by a garlicked old man upon the glory of a newborn body, but the...n maybe that's what the Jews had in mind and what makes the act seem quintessentially Jewish and the mark of their reality. Circumcision makes it clear as can be that you are here and not there, that you are out and not in--also that you're mine and not theirs.... Quite convincingly, circumcision gives the lie to the womb-dream of life in the beautiful state of innocent prehistory, the appealing idyll of living "naturally," unencumbered by man-made ritual. To be born is to lose all that. The heavy hand of human values falls upon you right at the start, marking your genitals as its own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clea...rly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »