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Book: Operation Shylock: A Confession
Quotes of Book: Operation Shylock: A
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  1. Philip Roth _ Operation Shylock: A

    I left the front stoop on Leslie Street, ate of the fruit of the tree of fiction, and nothing, neither reality nor myself, has been the same since.
    book-quote

  2. Philip Roth _ Operation Shylock: A

    I suppose I should have laughed even more uproariously at what happened next; as a newly anointed convert to the Old Comedy, I should have bounded to my feet, cried aloud, "Hallelujah!" and sung the praises of He Who Created Us, He Who Formed Us from the Mud, the One and Only Comic Almighty, OUR SOVEREIGN REDEEMER ARISTOPHANES, but for reasons all too profane {total mental paralysis} I could only gape at the sight of nothing less than the highly entertaining Aristophanic erection that Pipik had produced....
    book-quoteconvert-to-the-old-comedyone-and-only-comic-almighty

  3. Philip Roth _ Operation Shylock: A

    Look, I've got more personalities than I can use already. All you are is one too many.
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  4. Philip Roth _ Operation Shylock: A

    Would that I were still a ludicrous character in his lousy book!
    book-quoteludicrous-character

  5. Philip Roth _ Operation Shylock: A

    ...I finally went back to my seat in the second row and sat there doing what I've done throughout my professional life: I tried to think, first, how to make credible a somewhat extreme, if not outright ridiculous story, and, next, how, after telling it, to fortify and defend myself from the affronted who read into the story an intention having perhaps to do less with the author's perversity than with their own.
    book-quoteprofessional-lifeto-fortify-and-defend-myself

  6. Philip Roth _ Operation Shylock: A

    It was not for me, after these last seventy-two hours, to reject as too outlandish the possibility that the situation for him here had driven George crazy. Yet I did reject it. It was just too insipid a conclusion. Not everybody was cray. Resolute is not crazy. Deluded is not crazy. To be thwarted, vengeful, terrified, treacherous--this is not to be crazy. Not even fanatically held illusions are crazy, and deceit certainly isn't crazy--deceit, deviousness, cunning, cynicism, all of that is far from crazy...and there, that, , there was the key to my confusion. Of course!
    book-quotedeceitdeludedresolute

  7. Philip Roth _ Operation Shylock: A

    This is the plot up to the moment when the writer leaves the woman still dolefully enmeshed in it, and, suitcase in hand, tiptoeing so as not to disturb her postcoital rest, he himself slips silently out of the plot on the grounds of its general implausibility, a total lack of gravity, reliance at too many key points on unlikely coincidence, an absence of inner coherence, and not even the most tenuous evidence of anything resembling a serious meaning or purpose. The story so far is frivolously plotted, overplotted, for his taste altogether too freakishly plotted, with outlandish events so wildly careening around every corner that there is nowhere for intelligence to establish a foothold and develop a perspective. As if the look-alike at the story's storm center isn't farfetched enough, there is the capricious loss of the Smilesburger check {there is the fortuitous appearance of the Smilesburger check; there is Louis B. Smilesburger himself, Borscht Belt deus ex machina}, which sets the action on its unconvincing course and serves to reinforce the writer's sense that the story has been intentionally conceived as a prank, and a nasty prank at that, considering the struggles of Jewish existence that are said to be at issue by his antagonist.
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  8. Philip Roth _ Operation Shylock: A

    But I never did escape from this plot-driven world into a more congenial, subtly probable, innerly propelled narrative of my own devising--didn't make it to the airport,...--and that was because in the taxi I remembered a political cartoon I'd seen in the British papers when I was living in London during the Lebanon war, a detestable cartoon of a big-nosed Jew, his hands meekly opened out in front of him and his shoulders raised in a shrug as though to disavow responsibility, standing atop a pyramid of dead Arab bodies. Purportedly a caricature of Menachem Begin, then prime minister of Israel, the drawing was, in fact, a perfectly realistic, unequivocal depiction of a kike as classically represented in the Nazi press. The cartoon was what turned me around. Barely ten minutes out of Jerusalem, I told the driver to take me back to the King David Hotel.
    book-quotekike

  9. Philip Roth _ Operation Shylock: A

    ...they'll say, 'He never recovered from that breakdown and this was the result. It had to be the breakdown--not even he was that dreadful a novelist.
    book-quotedreadful-a-novelist
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