"The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress."
"You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you."
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Source: Portnoy's Complaint. Book by Philip Roth, January 12, 1969.
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"Only in America, Rabbi Golden, 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."
"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."
"He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense."
"Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre."
"The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open."