No Shame

You have to be shameless. You can’t worry about being decorous. This doesn’t mean that you have to be obscene and crazy and smear your pages with feces. That’s not the point. But shame won’t do. I couldn’t have written Sabbath’s Theater if I felt shame. I feel plenty of shame in my own life—don’t get me wrong. I’m just as shame ridden as the next person is. But when I sit down to write, I’m free from shame. When Portnoy isn’t enraged or lust ridden, I’m happy, just as when Mickey Sabbath is full of lust, I’m sitting in my studio inventing Mickey Sabbath in a state of horniness. I’m not horny when I’m sitting there writing it. So this is a crucial distinction that has to be made. Contrary to public opinion—such as it is—Zuckerman has no sex life whatsoever. In any of those books. I’ve found him being described as “the sex obsessed” and so on. It isn’t so.

PHILIP ROTH