The concerns of fiction, let it be said, are not those of a statistician — or of a public-relations firm. The novelist asks himself, "What do people … - Philip Roth

Oh Patimkin! Fruit grew in their refrigerator and sporting goods dropped from their trees!

I do not write a story to make evident whatever disapproval I may feel for adulterous men. I write a story of a man who is adulterous to reveal the condition of such a man. If the adulterous man is a Jew, then I am revealing the condition of an adulterous man who is a Jew. Why tell that story? Because I seem to be interested in how — and why and when — a man acts counter to what he considers to be his "best self," or what others assume it to be, or would like for it to be. The subject is hardly "mine"; it interested readers and writers for a long time before it became my turn to be engaged by it, too.

He tell us that in a democracy, keeping abreast of current events was a citizen’s most important duty and that you could never start too early to be informed about the news of the day.