51 quotes
A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die.
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
Why must he mistrust his life just when he was more its master than he'd been in years?.
Everyman (2006)
We don't get to live in the truth.
Sabbath's Theater (1995)
Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.
Everyman (2006)
Turned the wrong way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.
The Plot Against America (2004)
Oh Patimkin! Fruit grew in their refrigerator and sporting goods dropped from their trees!
Goodbye, Columbus (1959)
They boo you, they whistle, they stamp their feet — you hate it but you thrive on it. Because the things that wear you down are the things that nurture you and your talent.
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)
Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body.
Everyman (2006)
I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)
There’s a plot afoot all right, and I’ll gladly name the forces propelling it—hysteria, ignorance, malice, stupidity, hatred, and fear. What a repugnant spectacle our country has become! Falsehood, cruelty, and madness everywhere, and brute force in the wings waiting to finish us off.
The Plot Against America (2004)
[H]er breasts swam towards me like two pink-nosed fish and she let me hold them.
Goodbye, Columbus (1959)
I'm not trying to turn you into a bourgeois, Naomi. If the bed is too luxurious, we can do it on the floor.
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
[Mr. Michaels:] You try to be a thoughtful person, a reasonable person, an accommodating person, and then this happens. Where is the sens in life?
Nemesis (2010)
And he couldn't do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.
Sabbath's Theater (1995)
[Isadore:] Every day was endless for Alan because of his curiosity.
Nemesis (2010)
It’s a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, "Momma, do we believe in winter?"
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
The jealously. That poison. And unprovoked. Jealous even when she tells me she's going ice-skating with her eighteen-year-old brother.
The Dying Animal (2001)
It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)
There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.
The Human Stain (2000)