Pulling into the wrong station.

Yesterday, I blogged about the lovely Philip Roth Paris Review Interview from the 80s. There are many more lovely excerpts from it that I would love to transcribe here -- entire pages of it -- but for now, a few more paragraphs will have to do.

You're asking me about the relationship between art and life? It's like the relationship between the eight hundred or so hours that it took to be psychoanalyzed, and the eight or so hours that it would take to read Portnoy's Complaint loud. Life is long and art is shorter.

Also:

The thing about Zuckerman that interests me is that everbody's split, but few so openly as this. Everybody is full of cracks and fissures, but usually we see people trying very hard to hide the places where they're split. Most people desperately want to heal their lesions, and keep trying to. Hiding them is sometimes taken for healing them (or for not having them).

Later...talking about a tough time in his life after his marriage broke down:

The image that teased me during those years was of a train that had been shunted onto the wrong track. In my early twenties, I had been zipping right along there, you know - on schedule, express stops only, final destination clearly in mind; and then suddenly I was on the wrong track, speeding off into the wilds. I'd ask myself, "How the hell do you get this thing back on the right track?" Well, you can't. I've continued to be surprised, over the years, whenever I discover myself, late at night, pulling into the wrong station.

And so it goes....