Quotes From "Operation Shylock: A Confession" By Philip Roth

1
Where everything is words, you'd think I'd have some mastery and know my way around, but all this churning hatred, each man a verbal firing squad, immeasurable suspicions, a flood of mocking, angry talk, all of life a vicious debate, conversations in which there is nothing that cannot be said..no, I'd be better off in the jungle, I thought, where a roar's a roar and no one is hard put to miss its meaning. Philip Roth
2
Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind. Philip Roth
3
I understood that people are trying to transform themselves all the time: the universal urge to be otherwise. So as not to look as they look, sound as they sound, be treated as they are treated, suffer in the ways they suffer, etc., etc., they change hairdos, tailors, spouses, accents, friends, they change their addresses, their noses, their wallpaper, even their forms of government, all to be more like themselves or less like themselves, or more like or less like that exemplary prototype whose image is theirs to emulate or to repudiate obsessively for life. Philip Roth