Quotes from Betsy Lerner

There comes a time when you have to let go of the New Yorker fantasy in service of justing getting on with it [writing].

I understood Truman Capote's brilliant assessment of the writer's dilemma: "When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip.

There is a necessary gestation period during which a writer should protect his work, because the minute he sends it out, or joins a writing group, or enrolls in an MFA program, he engages the part of himself that is focused on the result more than the work. For

Writing, like drugs and recreational sex, becomes an activity associated with youth.

It's just a game," she says. Make no mistake: people who say it's just a game are out for blood.

My mother is always eager to talk when I come over, as if she were a famous actress and I am Diane Sawyer.

Once again, I had made my world a very small place, and I didn't want to live there.

I remember watching my mother emerge from her bedroom on a night when she and my father were going out, all dressed up in heels and hose, a skirt or dress that cinched her waist, her pearl choker like a ring around the moon. I'd watch her from my perch in the kitchen, walking trancelike as she fastened the back of an earring. I'd like to be small again, just for a little while, and feel close to her. I never really appreciated my mother. I never appreciated myself.

Reading The Facts, one gets the impression that Roth is the ultimate mama's boy, a prince, and that he could only paint a portrait of an über-Jewish mother because he was supremely confident of his own mother's love.

The writer labors in isolation, yet all that intensive, lonely work is in the service of communicating, is an attempt to reach another person.