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 , Operation Shylock: A Confession
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 , Operation Shylock: A Confession
5
" But I never did escape from this plot-driven world into a more congenial, subtly probable, innerly propelled narrative of my own devising--didn't make it to the airport,...--and that was because in the taxi I remembered a political cartoon I'd seen in the British papers when I was living in London during the Lebanon war, a detestable cartoon of a big-nosed Jew, his hands meekly opened out in front of him and his shoulders raised in a shrug as though to disavow responsibility, standing atop a pyramid of dead Arab bodies. Purportedly a caricature of Menachem Begin, then prime minister of Israel, the drawing was, in fact, a perfectly realistic, unequivocal depiction of a kike as classically represented in the Nazi press. The cartoon was what turned me around. Barely ten minutes out of Jerusalem, I told the driver to take me back to the King David Hotel. "
― Philip Roth , Operation Shylock: A Confession
6
" This is the plot up to the moment when the writer leaves the woman still dolefully enmeshed in it, and, suitcase in hand, tiptoeing so as not to disturb her postcoital rest, he himself slips silently out of the plot on the grounds of its general implausibility, a total lack of gravity, reliance at too many key points on unlikely coincidence, an absence of inner coherence, and not even the most tenuous evidence of anything resembling a serious meaning or purpose. The story so far is frivolously plotted, overplotted, for his taste altogether too freakishly plotted, with outlandish events so wildly careening around every corner that there is nowhere for intelligence to establish a foothold and develop a perspective. As if the look-alike at the story's storm center isn't farfetched enough, there is the capricious loss of the Smilesburger check (there is the fortuitous appearance of the Smilesburger check; there is Louis B. Smilesburger himself, Borscht Belt deus ex machina), which sets the action on its unconvincing course and serves to reinforce the writer's sense that the story has been intentionally conceived as a prank, and a nasty prank at that, considering the struggles of Jewish existence that are said to be at issue by his antagonist. "
― Philip Roth , Operation Shylock: A Confession
14
" It was not for me, after these last seventy-two hours, to reject as too outlandish the possibility that the situation for him here had driven George crazy. Yet I did reject it. It was just too insipid a conclusion. Not everybody was cray. Resolute is not crazy. Deluded is not crazy. To be thwarted, vengeful, terrified, treacherous--this is not to be crazy. Not even fanatically held illusions are crazy, and deceit certainly isn't crazy--deceit, deviousness, cunning, cynicism, all of that is far from crazy...and there, that, deceit, there was the key to my confusion. Of course! "
― Philip Roth , Operation Shylock: A Confession
