“These girls with old gents don't do it despite the age—they're drawn to the age, they do it for the age. Why? In Consuela's case, because the vast difference in age gives her permission to submit, I think. My age and mystatus give her, rationally, the license to surrender, and surrendering in bed is a not unpleasant sensation. But simultaneously, to give yourself over intimately to a much, much older man provides this sort of younger woman with authority of a kind she cannot get in a sexual arrangement with a younger man. She gets both the pleasures of submission and the pleasures of mastery.”

American novelist and short-story writer

Philip Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Born in 1933 and active for much of the 20th and early 21st centuries, he is best known for fiction that probes American and Jewish identity with sharp humor and formal daring. Much of Roth's work is set in or shaped by Newark, New Jersey, his birthplace. His books often blur the line between autobiography and invention, and they are marked by sexual candor, philosophical play, and a vivid, inventive style. He first drew wide notice with Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, and later reached a broad audience with Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman appears in several novels as his literary alter ego, and in others Roth uses a fictionalized version of himself, including The Plot Against America.