The book was sloppily written in many parts (the words came too quickly and too easily) and there was hardly a noun in any sentence that was not holding hands with the nearest and most commonly availa...
Roth was feeling a gentle warmth as he thought of his son. He was remembering the way his son used to awaken him on Sunday mornings. His wife would put the baby in bed with him, and the child would st...
One’s own literary work was the only answer to the war in Vietnam.
Love was here today and left us dry did we deserve Him?
His deepest detestation was often reserved for the nicest of liberal academics, as if their lives were his own life but a step escaped. Like the scent of the void which comes off the pages of a Xerox...
He had been given the job and he was going to do it. But now for the first time he hated it genuinely. Perhaps there had been too many fatigue-products, perhaps the cumulative labor had dissolved and...
Gary Mark Gilmore: Go down on me, partner... I need itNicole Baker: Don't call me partner.Gary Mark Gilmore: No, darlin'... I love it... I love itNicole Baker: Yeah, you and seven other motherfuckers.
For it’s exactly when we come closest to another, that we are turned away with a lie, and blunder forward to comprehend ourselves on the misperceptions of the past.
All you need do is nod. I already know nine parts in ten of what he will say, but it is like fishing. Be patient, and you will get what you came for.
A fire had begun to spread in me. It was burning now in my stomach and my lungs were dry as old leaves, my heart had a herded pressure which gave promise to explode.
If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.
Lofting itself massively into the low-hanging clouds of the sky. In the early drab twilight it looked like an immense old gray elephant erecting himself somberly on his front legs, his haunches lost i...
Was it an hour, or a week before the light of the moon rose in the interior of my body? A bird with luminous wings flew in front of that full moon, and its head was as radiant as a point of light. Tha...
Then the Warden said, Do you have anything you’d like to say? and Gary looked up at the ceiling and hesitated, then said, Let’s do it. That was it. The most pronounced amount of courage, Vern decided,...
The moments like these, the passing doubts, were the temptations that caught you if you were not careful.
It was getting to be the best conversation she ever had. She had always thought the only way to have conversations like that was in your head. Then
He does see Himself as the Divine Artist. Of course, He is also a blunderer—so many of His creations are botched. A good many are disasters which He then proceeds to plow back into the food chain. Tha...
Happiness is experienced most directly in the intervals between terror.
Characters in novels sometimes radiate more energy, therefore, when we don’t enter their mind. It is one of the techniques a novelist acquires instinctively—don’t go into your protagonist’s thoughts u...
Angels often flee from people who scream too loudly—they know at such moments how close the man or woman is to us, and they feel outnumbered. For devils rush in to attend such outcries.