"The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice."

--

Source : "Philip Roth Reconsidered" by Irving Howe, Vol. 54, December, 1972.

Irving Howe

#Reading Quotes #Complaints Quotes

“This is a long tough road we have to travel. The men that can do things are going to be sought out just as surely as the sun rises in the morning. Fake reputations, habits of glib and clever speech, and glittering surface performance are going to be discovered.”
“The employment of the poor in roads and public works, and a tendency among landlords and persons of property to build, to improve and beautify their grounds, and to employ workmen and menial servants, are the means most within our power and most directly calculated to remedy the evils arising from that disturbance in the balance of produce and consumption.”
“When I started to sing, my mother would have me engaged to perform at the Women's Christian Temperance Union national or annual meetings. I would hate doing this because I wanted to play baseball or go off skiing.”
“Move to a new country and you quickly see that visiting a place as a tourist, and actually moving there for good, are two very different things.”
“Don't worry about your heart, it will last you as long as you live.”
“John Paul was the first modern pope to grow up in a secular culture: He attended public schools, danced with girls - indeed, as a teenager he had a crush on a beautiful Jewish girl who fled his hometown just ahead of the arrival of the Germans.”
“He had taken seriously words which were without importance, and it made him very unhappy.”
“Once I start writing, I am a huge reviser. To me writing is revising. I probably turn over every sentence that I write, to see if I have the rhythm right. That's why my first drafts take a really long time.”

Source : Source: therumpus.net

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