You go to someone and you think, 'I'll tell him this.' But why? The impulse is that the telling is going to relieve you. And that's why you feel awful later--you've relieved yourself, and if it truly is tragic and awful, it's not better, it's worse---the exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse.
Interpretation
Confessing personal tragedies may provide temporary relief but can exacerbate feelings of misery.
This quote by Philip Roth suggests that while the act of confiding in someone might feel like a way to alleviate emotional burdens, it can ironically lead to increased distress. The notion of exhibitionism in confession implies that sharing deep, personal pains can sometimes transform the experience into something more painful rather than healing, emphasizing the complexity of sharing one's suffering.
In practice
In a therapy session where discussing personal struggles can lead to catharsis.
American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property--on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.
I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.
Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself
When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.
I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.
She felt like a fictional character who'd escaped the book in which her creator had carefully and kindly trapped her, taken a pair of scissors to her outline and leaped, free.
He who is by nature not his own but another's man is by nature a slave.
Soon comes the cold, and the night that never ends.
You are the luminous mystery in which the entire universe with its forms and phenomena arises and subsides. When this realization dawns there is a complete transformation of your personal self into your universal self . . . the complete loss of all fear, including death. You have become a being who radiates love the same way the sun radiates light. You have finally arrived at the place from which your journey began.
Is there not some chosen curse, some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven, red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man who owes his greatness to his country's ruin!
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