Quoting Roth

Quotes from Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer -

'I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around ... And I ask myself, Why is there no way but this for me to fill my hours?'

'The life he described sounded like paradise to me; that he could think to do nothing better with his time than turn sentences around seemed to me like a blessing bestowed not only upon him but upon world literature.'

'But what else was there? If he played the violin or the piano, then he might have had some serious activity other than reading to occupy him when he was not writing. The problem with just listening to music was that if he sat alone with a record in the afternoon, he soon found himself turning the sentences around in his head ... '

'... but mostly it was the drama of that face, combined with the softness and intelligence in her large pale eyes ... '

' "If your life consists of reading and writing and looking at the snow, you'll wind up like me. Fantasy for thirty years." Lonoff made "Fantasy" sound like breakfast cereal. '

'... carried away by the idea that if I were a perfidious brute, I at least would be a truthful perfidious brute ...'

'Ordinary human pleasures have nothing to do with it. Ordinary human pleasures be damned. The young man wants to be an artist.'

'I beg of you - I'd rather live and die alone, I'd rather endure that than another moment of your bravery! I cannot take any more moral fiber in the face of life's disappointments!'

'It's no picnic up there in the egosphere.'

'I loved him! Yes, nothing less than love for this man with no illusions: love for the bluntness, the scrupulosity, the severity, the estrangement; love for the relentless winnowing out of the babyish, preening, insatiable self; love for the artistic mulishness and the suspicion of nearly everything else; and love for the buried charm ...'

'... the writer whose absorption with "the grand human discord" made his every paragraph a little novel in itself, every page packed as tight as Dickens or Dostoevsky with the latest news of manias, temptations, passions, and dreams, with mankind aflame with feeling ...'

'We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.'

'Oh, what sitting ducks I had for parents! A son of theirs would have had to be a half-wit or a sadist not to make them proud.'

'What set of aesthetic values makes your think that the cheap is more valid than the noble and the slimy is more truthful than the sublime?'

'Maybe if I were locked up again in a room somewhere and fed on rotten potatoes and clothed in rags and terrified out of my wits, maybe then I could write a decent story for Mr. Lonoff!'

' ... the time will come when we are people again, and not just Jews.'

' ... a ceremony lasting about ten minutes - and that was all it took to make them the enemy. It did not even take that much. It took nothing - that was the horror.'

'Let her see how noble and heroic you are by the twenty-seventh draft.'

'There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with!'

'But what do I know, other than what I can imagine?'