“Look, I don’t mind your reading it. I wouldn’t have left it lying around if I worried about your reading it. I carry it back and forth between here and the studio because sometimes I sit in the bedroom, as you know, sit in the bedroom chair at the end of the day, while you are asleep in bed, and make up little conversations between myself and this woman. And other women too. Maybe to the degree that I carry on like this in the bedroom where you are sleeping, maybe to that degree I am guilty of a sort of perverse betrayal. But then I am not the only man who thinks about imaginary women while in the bedroom with the woman he regularly sleeps with. There may even be women who behave just as impurely in their bedrooms with the men they regularly sleep with. The difference is that what I impurely imagine, I am impelled to develop and write down. A mitigating circumstance: my work, my livelihood. In my imagination I am unfaithful to everybody, by the way, not just to you.” (Philip Roth: Deception)
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