I'm not trying to turn you into a bourgeois, Naomi. If the bed is too luxurious, we can do it on the floor. - Philip Roth

I am thirteen. At long last, not a cored apple. Not an empty milk bottle greased with vaseline, but a girl in a slip, with two tits and a cunt — and a mustache, but who am I to be picky.

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.

Why must he mistrust his life just when he was more its master than he'd been in years?.