"The characterizing tragedy of the 20th Century" is the "counter-brutality of the revolution, and the subsequent degeneration of its ideals into stultifying bureaucracy..."
"The most mysterious and fateful of all human relationships" is the one between children and parents. "There is no dissolution of these states except death"
"The only way writers themselves know to be valid for an understanding of their work; through the work itself"
"The political movements against the state, with the aim of freeing the people, in Roth forges a leg iron of its own by which the revolutionary is going to find himself hobbled."
"The old and eternal truth (is) that the individual is always defeated in the end."
"the text gives us the man (the author), not the other way around"
"The leveling of age and social dissolution respects no rank."