Quotes About Identity

It's no picnic up there in the egosphere.

Where was the Jew in him? You couldn't find it and yet you knew it was there. Where was the irrationality in him? Where was the crybaby in him? Where were the wayward temptations? No guile. No artifice. No mischief. All that he had eliminated to achieve his perfection. No striving, no ambivalence, no doubleness- just the style, the natural physical refinement of a star.

I can't really tell objectively how sorry I should feel for myself. I don't give the same credibility to my being that other people give to theirs. Everything feels acted." "Everything is acted." "Whatever. With me there's some glue missing, something fundamental to everyone else that I don't have. My life never seems real to me.

Don't tell me he's bisexual! Don't tell me this is more of the guy in the hallway! Don't tell me he wants us to have it off together, Philip Roth fucking Philip Roth! That, I'm afraid, is a form of masturbation too fancy even for me.

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self.... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself — a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required.... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.

Why can't Jews with their Jewish problems be human beings with their human problems?

Forse è tutto ciò che sono realmente: un leccatore di figa, una bocca schiava del buco femminile. Lecca! E così sia! Forse la soluzione più saggia per me è vivere a quattro zampe! Strisciare attraverso la vita ingozzandomi di passera, lasciando che a raddrizzare i torti e a fare i padri di famiglia siano le creature erette!

To be alive, to him, is to be made of memory—to him if a man's not made of memory, he's made of nothing.

One's story isn't a skin to be shed— it's inescapable, one's body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that's at once your invention and the invention of you.

Gogol, Kafka y compañía… va a tener serios problemas si sigue por ese camino.

devi fare solo questo, presentare una buona e coerente versione di te stesso, e nessuno verrà mai a farti domande.

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Do me a favor, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass_ I happen also to be a human being!

Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged—where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.

Look, I've got more personalities than I can use already. All you are is one too many.

I never wanted to be Protestant. Jews do, plenty of them. Not me. To be assimilated, to be respectable, to be detached like the Wasps, I understand the desire, but I knew never to try. I see all those distinguished Wasps with the beautiful gray hair and the pinstripe suits who don't have pimples on their ass. They're my lawyers....These guys are quiet. I don't want to be that way. I couldn't begin to be that way. I'm the wild Jew of the pampas. I am the Golem of the U.S.A.

But by the third year he had come to wonder whether Laura's purpose wasn't the shield behind which he was still hiding his own, even from himself.

You're our Marcel Proust, Mr. Zuckerman. Zuckerman laughed. It wasn't exactly how he saw it.

Even a monster has to be from somewhere—even a monster needs parents. But parents don't need monsters.

Without an old country link and a strangling church like the Italians, or the Irish, or the Poles, without generations of the American forebears to bind you to American life, or blind you by your loyalties to its deformities, you could read whatever you wanted and write however and whatever you pleased. Alienated? Just another way to say 'set free.' A Jew set free from Jews - yet only by steadily maintaining self-consciousness as a Jew. That was the thrilling paradoxical kicker.

Was she impersonating someone, acting from a script prepared beforehand? Or was I dealing with a person who could not be dealt with because she was mad?

Ma, you want to see physical violence done to the Jews of Newark, go to the office of the plastic surgeon where the girls get their noses fixed. That's where the Jewish blood flows in Essex County, that's where the blow is delivered—with a mallet! To their bones—and to their pride!

I'll be curious to see how we all come out someday. It could be an interesting story. You're not so nice and polite in your fiction, he said. You're a different person.

I'm looking at myself," he said, ecstatically, "except it's you.