Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Philip Roth, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Philip Roth quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 307 Philip Roth quotes for you to read and share.

Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000003340
How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn't see it with my own eyes, I'd think I was having a hallucination." Though -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000028895
The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000029693
Not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized--that was the dream of his life. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000033880
A man who's discontents were barely known to himself, awakening in middle age to the horror of self-reflection. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000037016
Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000037116
Everyone thinks at some time or other that in a hundred years no one now alive will be on earth - the overwhelming force will sweep the place clean. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000042968
Being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000061140
Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000065180
Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000086983
I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000096548
When he is sick, every man wants his mother. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000119455
People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000129950
Madeline displayed the bright sadder-but-wiser outlook of an alert first grader who'd discovered the alphabet in a school where Ecclesiastes is the primer - life is futility, a deeply terrible experience, but the really serious thing is reading. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000137075
If you don't know the fantasy life of a country, it's hard to write fiction about it. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000142427
A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000146389
We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000147636
Can anyone be utterly without thoughtfulness? The answer is yes. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000149948
Were we just two more rootless jungle-dwelling erotomaniacs creamining in their pre-faded jeans over Historical New England, dreaming the old agrarian dream in their rent-a-car convertible -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000160452
'Haunted by the past' is a commonplace phrase because it's a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, 'haunted', the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000160512
This man did not deal in fairy tales. You could see that as soon as you walked into his office. Schevitz was somebody who liked to be proved right, somebody whose wish to prevail was his vocation. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000189855
How much time could you spend staring out the ocean, even if it was the ocean you'd loved since you were a boy? -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000190952
My God, he thought, the man I once was!
The life that surrounded me! The force that was mine! No "otherness" to be felt anywhere! Once upon a time I was a full human being. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000191102
Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out? Does anyone find anyone that enchanting unless they have sexual business with them? Who else are you enchanted by? Nobody. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000199277
Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000204202
There are no uncontaminated angels -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000211377
You don't have to work in a mental hospital to know about husbands and wives. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000212208
Before that night, I'd had no idea my father was so well suited for wreaking havoc or equipped to make that lightning-quick transformation from sanity to lunacy that is indispensable in enacting the unbridled urge to destroy. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000215495
Now that he was no longer grounded in his hate, we were going to talk about women. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000218785
Other people's weakness can destroy you just as much as their strength can. Weak people are not harmless. Their weakness can be their strength. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000222730
One's story isn't a skin to be shed - it's inescapable, one's body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that's at once your invention and the invention of you. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000227158
Writing is like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000233966
Why, emotionally, is a man of his type reciprocally connected to a woman of her type? The usual reason: their flaws fit. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000240356
I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000248050
Either foreswear fucking others or the affair is over. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000261514
LaHill was a dark, burly fellow whose hair curled out of his clothes wherever it could. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000267621
When, with a smile, she let the dirt slip slowly across her curled palm and out the side of her hand onto the coffin, the gesture looked like the prelude to a carnal act. Clearly this was a man to whom she'd once given much thought. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000271398
Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000281153
There was always something about our family, and I don't mean color--there was something about us that impeded you. You think like a prisoner. You do, Coleman Brutus. You're white as snow and you think like a slave. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000285218
Perhaps,' I wearily suggest, 'reading is the opiate of the educated classes.' 'Is it? Are you thinking of becoming a flower child?' he says, lighting up a new cigar. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000303125
I know the kind of man I am and the kind of writer. I have my own kind of bravery, and please, let's leave it at that. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000330111
The joy of awakening each morning knowing there were all those empty hours ahead to be filled only with work. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000331872
You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000334241
Time having transformed his own body into a storehouse for man-made contraptions designed to fend off collapse ... there was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000344065
( ... ) he walked away understanding, ( ... ) how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made ... on the other hand, how accidental fate may seem when things can never turn out other than they do. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000344497
Old Blotnik had been mumbling so steadily for so many years, Ozzie suspected he had memorized the prayers and forgotten all about God. It -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000345687
There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with! -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000345917
Simple was never that simple. Still, the self-questioning did take some time to reach him. And if there's anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it's self-questioning coming too late. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000364870
At the outset of my mature life, before everything suddenly became so difficult, I had a great talent for being satisfied. I'd -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000369173
You tasted it. Isn't that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That's all we're given in life, that's all we're given of life. A taste. There is no more. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000369580
Now, I'm very vulnerable to female beauty, as you know. Everybody's defenseless against something, and that's it for me. I see it and it blinds me to everything else. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000374370
Nothing that befalls anyone is too senseless to have happened. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000382538
But the danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop. I don't know anything harder to control than hating. Easier to kick drinking than to master hate. And that is saying something. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000383259
I did not want to voice a word that would lift the cover and reveal that hideous emotion I always felt for her, the underside of love. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000388960
There's something every woman wants, and that's a man to blame. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000389355
What I would really love to happen to me would be if I came upon an idea that would keep me busy until I die so I wouldn't have to go through the business of thinking up a new book. But I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000403863
Son, anything can happen to anyone," my father told me, "but it usually doesn't. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000406400
We'll go to the most posh gynecologist in New York. One who gets Harper's Bazaar for the reception room. How does that sound? -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000409065
There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000411576
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. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000415083
Steeped like a teabag in aristocratic pretensions ... -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000418432
It's the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000419285
Because history is not the background - history is the stage! And you are on the stage! Oh, how sickening is your appalling ignorance of your own times! -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000420479
None of us ate together: my Aunt Gladys ate at five o'clock, my cousin Susan at five-thirty, me at six, and my uncle at six-thirty. There is nothing to explain this beyond the fact that my aunt is crazy. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000420661
The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral - into the indigenous American berserk. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000421593
The operating room turns you into somebody who's never wrong. Much like writing."
"Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right some day is the perversity that draws you on. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000426117
I couldn't imagine anything that could have made Coleman more of a mystery to me than this unmasking. Now that I knew everything, it was as though I knew nothing -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000426448
What is so often laughable, in the stories of Kundera's Czechoslovakia, is how grimly serious just about everything turns out to be, jokes and games and pleasure included; what's laughable is how terribly little there is to laugh at with any joy. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000429581
Here in America either it's Faunia Farley or it's Monica Lewinsky! The luxury of these lives disquieted so by the inappropriate comportment of Clinton and Silk! -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000430265
America?" said Gamesh, smiling. "Roland, what's American to you? Or me, or those tens of thousands up in the the stands? It's just a word they use to keep your nose to the grindstone and your toes to the line. America is the opiate of the people. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000432993
We've sifted through the eight thousand, don't worry about that. And this is the one. This is the murder weapon, no doubt about it."

Then the President has been murdered?"

I cant tell you that right now. But I can assure you that if there has been a murder, this is what did it. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000443080
She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000459552
I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000464941
It was my job not just to pluck the chickens but to eviscerate them. I hated that part. Nauseating and disgusting, but it had to be done. That's what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000471718
Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000476528
There's no remaking reality ... Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There's no other way. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000485314
But may I ask, Marcus, merely out of curiosity, how you manage to get by in life - filled as our lives inevitably are with trial and tribulation - lacking religious or spiritual guidance?" "I get straight A's, sir. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000485435
It's so heartbreaking, violence, when it's in a house-like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000497530
There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000498781
The pompous son of a bitch knows everythingit's too bad he doesn't know anything else. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000508396
Three generations. All of them growing. The working. The saving. The success. Three generations in raptures over America. Three generations of becoming one with a people. And now with the fourth it had all come to nothing. The total vandalization of their world. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000527737

nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000540502
The horror of being caged has lost its thrill. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000549840
True, he had chosen to live alone, but not unbearably alone. The worst of being unbearably alone was that you had to bear it - either that or you were sunk. You had to work hard to prevent your mind from sabotaging you by its looking hungrily back at the superabundant past. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000550511
Many farcical, illogical, incomprehensible transactions are subsumed by the mania of lust. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000554050
What I'm saying, Doctor, is that I don't seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds - as though through fucking I will discover America. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000561196
Never in his life had occasion to ask himself, "Why are things the way they are?" Why should he bother, when the way they were was always perfect? Why are things the way they are? The question to which there is no answer, and up till then he was so blessed he didn't even know the question existed. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000579991
My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets - no, they're little gifts, containing meanings! -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000580786
Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000586944
I would quit while you're ahead. Really. It's an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and you write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it's not any good. I would say just stop now. You don't want to do this to yourself. That's my advice to you. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000605869
Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000608614
The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000611963
Could he continue to maintain his sanity that long? He didn't know. That's why he was devouring two or three books a day - to remove himself every minute that he possibly could from the madness of this life. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000615633
Alvin didn't cry, didn't curse, didn't holler ... He was too far gone to roar on that day or even to crack. Only I did ... Only I cracked, alone, later in the one place in our house where I knew I could go to be apart from the living and all that they cannot not do. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000616484
When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
-- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000616488
I work most days and if you work most days and you get at least a page done a day, then at the end of the year you have 365. So the pages accumulate and then I publish the books. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000620126
I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000622205
So. Now you know the worst thing I have ever done. I fucked my own family's dinner. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000627513
Simple is never that simple. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000640225
Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000661881
Even when she was dressed up she didn't look like a chosen person. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000662579
What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000666043
A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die! -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000666972
It's amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000669052
Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000671355
I'm the only one who gives her a whole can of tuna for lunch, and I'm not talking dreck, either. I'm talking Chicken of the Sea, Alex. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000682784
A nervous, undernourished girl who continually looked down the front of her gown as though there was some sort of construction project going on under her clothes. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000698362
Even a monster has to be from somewhere - even a monster needs parents. But parents don't need monsters. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000706011
You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000718814
I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000722069
My father believes not what he sees with his eyes for an entire lifetime, instead he believes what he's told by the plumber on his knees fixing the toilet in the back of the store!" I couldn't stop. He'd been driven crazy by the chance remark of a plumber! "Yeah, -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000734173
Play the moment, play whatever plays for you in that moment, and then go to the next moment. It doesn't matter where you're going. Don't worry about that. Just take it moment, moment, moment, moment. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000747842
Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000764976
Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000768473
A young panther in cufflinks and a pinstriped suit - a panther ready to pounce. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000768936
If he had another brother he would call him. But for a brother he has only Jerry and Jerry has only him. For a daughter he has only Merry. For a father she has only him. There is no way around any of this. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000769218
She thinks, I'm telling him who I am. He's interested in who I am. That is true, but I am curious about who she is because I want to fuck her. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000779334
Beyond your dormitories, a world is on fire and you are kindled by underwear. Beyond your fraternities, history unfolds daily - warfare, bombings, wholesale slaughter, and you are oblivious of it all. Well, you won't be oblivious for long! You can be as stupid as you like, can -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000801302
But to wish oneself into another's glory, as boy or as man, is an impossibility, untenable on psychological grounds if you are not a writer, and on aesthetic grounds if you are. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000801905
The phallic dignity, of a powerhouse of a warrior prince, is how the great imaginative literature of Europe begins, -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000824565
All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000843861
The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions ... -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000852067
To become a celebrity is to become a brand name. There is Ivory Soap, Rice Krispies, and Philip Roth. Ivory is the soap that floats; Rice Krispies the breakfast cereal that goes snap-crackle-pop; Philip Roth the Jew who masturbates with a piece of liver. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000855676
Human conduct can be regulated, and it will be regulated! The -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000857688
You take off your clothes and you're in bed with somebody, and that is indeed where whatever you've concealed, your particularity, whatever it may be, however encrypted, is going to be found out, and that's what all the shyness is all about and what everybody fears. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000867576
His mother had died at eighty, his father at ninety. Aloud he said to them,
"I'm seventy-one. Your boy is seventy-one." "Good. You lived," his mother replied, and his father said, "Look back and atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000867950
Why does someone, in the midst of your worst suffering, decide the time has come to drive home, disguised in the form of character analysis, all the contempt they have been harbouring for you for all these years? -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000879546
Terrifying encounters with the end? I'm thirty-four! Worry about oblivion, he told himself, when you're seventy-five! The remote future will be time enough to anguish over the ultimate catastrophe! -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000889524
How can one say, 'No, this isn't a part of life,' since it always is? The contaminant of sex, the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000894965
You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000908326
wonderful except when it came to eviscerating chickens. And even that was wonderful in its way, because it was something you did, and did well, that you didn't care to do. So there was a lesson in doing it. And -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000908364
The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000915075
And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000920910
The goal was to have goals, the aim to have aims. This edict came entangled often in hysteria, the embattled hysteria of those whom experience had taught how little antagonism it takes to wreck a life beyond repair. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000921884
You are not just shackled to your life while living it, you continue to be stuck with it after you're gone. Or, -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000926249
Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000931468
She wanted to collapse and be rescued, and she wanted to be heroic and prevail, and she seemed to hate him most for reminding her, merely by taking it all in, that she could manage neither. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000942677
Each book starts from ashes really. I don't feel that I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell or that story to tell, but I want to be occupied with the writing process while I'm living. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000947032
One has periods of ghastliness. And then long periods of sort of quiet and love. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000948048
Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000948062
The question to ask about the writer isn't 'Why does he behave so badly?' but 'What does he gain by wearing this mask? -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000961544
I don't know anybody. I turn sentences around, and that's it. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000971121
I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000972647
Is that what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime's minutiae? Who could have imagined that one would have forever to remember each moment of life down to its tiniest component? -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000976800
At a certain stage of misery, you'll try anything to explain what's going on with you, even if you know it doesn't explain a thing and it's one failed explanation after another. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000977859
I DON'T WANT TO LEAVE IT UP TO A CHILD TO DECIDE TO EAT JESUS. I HAVE THE HIGHEST RESPECT FOR WHATEVER YOU DO, BUT MY GRANDCHILD IS NOT GOING TO EAT JESUS. I'M SORRY. THAT IS OUT OF THE QUESTION. HERE'S WHAT I'LL DO FOR YOU. I'LL GIVE YOU THE BAPTISM. THAT'S ALL I CAN DO FOR YOU. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000979198
The only way to have a funeral is to invite everyone who ever knew the person and just wait for the accident to happen-somebody who comes in out of the blue and says the truth. Everything else is table manners. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000992417
He couldn't do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 000999743
The only patient being treated by the writer is himself -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001017864
Self-laceration is never more than a memory away -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001019722
Nathan called all shiksas Maria
the explanation seemed as ludicrously simple as that. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001023011
Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them
at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001023580
What I wanted was the tiniest thing in the world: to be like everyone else. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001031782
The signore ... wishes her to begin at the beginning. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001034753
In school we chanted, along with our teacher, I am the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my soul, and meanwhile, within my own body, an anarchic insurrection had been launched by one of my privates- which I was helpless to put down! -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001036656
It's no picnic up there in the egosphere. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001043156
The most enviable genius in literary history is the guy who invented alphabet soup: nobody knows who he is. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001071958
He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001085060
How Far back must we go to discover the beginning of trouble? -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001095623
Also, she had been secretary to the soccer coach, an office pretty much without laurels in our own time, but apparently the post for a young girl to hold in Jersey City during the First World War. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001102472
Would that I were still a ludicrous character in his lousy book! -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001109270
But it is INTERESTING trying to get a handle on one's own subjectivity
something to think about, to play around with, and what's more fun than that? -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001110836
You've got a good girl this time. Don't screw it up. Don't let her go. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001115811
No, he wasn't a Jain, thought the Swede, but he might as well have been - he was just as pathetically and naively nonviolent. The idiocy of the uprightness of the goals he had set. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001116564
You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001120599
He was no more, freed from
being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001130432
There are no reasons. She is obliged to be as she is. We all are. Reasons are in books. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001131886
Well, good Christ, how was I supposed to know all that, Hannah? Who looks into the fine points when he's hungry? I'm eight years old and chocolate pudding happens to get me hot. All I have to do is see that deep chocolatey surface gleaming out at me from the refrigerator, and my life isn't my own. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001138758
What use to skip those two grades in grammar school and get such a jump on everybody else,
when the result is to wind up so far behind? -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001141877
For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001146906
Nothing keeps its promise. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001148357
Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001150174
You have a fighting spirit. I admire that, or would admire it should you choose to harness it to a worthier cause than that of someone considered a criminal subversive by his own national government. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001155880
Of a terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices archive the most disproportionate result. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001157856
Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001159364
It's a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, Momma, do we believe in winter? -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001164868
Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001195624
With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two years your life stopped. If you had been running in the direction of your life, you had to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain boring. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001216499
To become a new being. To bifurcate. The drama that underlies America's story, the high drama that is upping and leaving-and the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands. - p. 342 -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001218262
I do not say correct or savory. I do not say seemly or even natural. I say serious. Sensationally serious. Unspeakably serious. Solemnly, recklessly, blissfully serious. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001221278
How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001226661
Who are they now? They are the simplest version possible of themselves ... They are out from under everything ever piled on top of them. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001233279
Don't tell me he's bisexual! Don't tell me this is more of the guy in the hallway! Don't tell me he wants us to have it off together, Philip Roth fucking Philip Roth! That, I'm afraid, is a form of masturbation too fancy even for me. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001233364
Gone were the days when Zuckerman had only to worry about Zuckerman making money: henceforth he would have to worry about his money making money. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001234981
I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter that means you had a hard time during the Bush years. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001243209
I think you're a wonder. You're beautiful. You're mature. You are, I admit, vastly more experienced than I am. That's what threw me. I was thrown. Forgive me. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001244723
Old age isn't a battle: old age is a massacre. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001266806
Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001267285
I don't wish to be a slave any longer to the stringent exigencies of literature. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001272544
Each book starts from ashes. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001272545
The burden isn't that everything has to be a book. It's that everything can be a book. And doesn't count as life until it is. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001272546
When I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on. And then, especially with the help of the computer, rewriting is so easy to do with the computer, much easier than it used to be with the typewriter. So the books go through numerous drafts. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001272547
The book can't compete with the screen. It couldn't compete beginning with the movie screen. It couldn't compete with the television screen and it can't compete with the computer screen I don't think. And now we have all those screens so against all those screens I think the book can't measure up. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001272549
A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001272551
The book really comes to life in the rewriting. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001279651
I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a picnic and that I was no picnic myself. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001293530
Good Christ, a Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die! -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001299207
Always pick a redhead, Ee-oh", Manny said. "he'll give you the best fight in the world. Redhead'll never quit. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001305180
Stunned by how little he'd gotten over her and she'd gotten over him, he walked away understanding, as outside his reading in classical Greek drama he'd never had to understood before, how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made ... -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001308071
Nothing could appear to be more human than refusing to believe extinction possible so long as you were encircled by luscious eggplants and ripe tomatoes[..] -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001311721
Try to shorten the base paths in order to reach home plate faster and score. All you will have accomplished by that technique is to cheapen the value of a run. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001316220
As far as I can see there is no conquering or exorcising the past with words - words born either of imagination or forthrightness. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001316824
What is astonishing is that we, who had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happened. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001317656
For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001323458
(Writing is) the transformation, through an elaborate impersonation, of a personal emergency into a public act (in both senses of that word). -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001333292
I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again ... -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001344336
Zuckerman, sucker though he was for seriousness, was still not going to be drawn into a discussion about agents and editors. If ever there was a reason for an American writer to seek asylum in Red China, it would be to put ten thousand miles between himself and those discussions. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001362469
There was a mattress, discolored and waterlogged, like a cartoon-strip drunk slumped against a pole. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001370900
Spring me from this role I play of the smothered son in the Jewish joke! Because it's beginning to pall a little at thirty-three! -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001373215
so conspicuous was his abhorrence of "rebellious insolence" that he might have been enunciating the name of a menace resolved to undermine not just Winesburg, Ohio, but the great republic itself. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001389467
In short, dozens of conflicting, truncated impressions were already teasing to be understood, but the wisest course seemed to me to keep them to myself so long as I didn't begin to know what they added up to. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001407420
Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001413630
But in Old Rimrock, NJ, in 1995, when the Ivan Ilyches come trooping back to lunch at the clubhouse after their morning round of golf and started to crow, "It doesn't get any better than this," they may be a lot closer to the truth than Leo Tolstoy ever was. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001414533
As for God, it was easy to think kindly of Him in a paradise like Indian Hill. It was something else in Newark - or Europe or the Pacific - in the summer of 1944. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001416393
He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance. And where does God figure in this? -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001427346
He was trying hard to continue to exist as himself despite the unlikeliness of everything. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001428533
People think of history in the long term, but history, in fact, it's a very sudden thing. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001433366
If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001436446
Don't care why we have it, we are here to admit that we have it and help each other get rid of it. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001440066
Everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say; and everything you do does either more than you wanted it to do or less than you wanted it to do. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001452135
Nothing is more uplifting in all of life than righteous anger. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001457571
For all that I announce at intervals that I want to go mad, it is apparently impossible: beyond me, beneath me. It took This for me to learn that I am a citadel of sanity. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001460393
Because you happen to be a writer doesn't mean you have to deny yourself the ordinary human pleasure of being praised and applauded. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001462735
Others? He dares to call us others? He's the other. The one who looks most American - and he's the one who is least American! The man is unfit. He shouldn't be there. He shouldn't be there, and it's as simple as that! -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001471372
I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001480242
Dreams? If only they had been! But I don't need dreams, Doctor, that's why I hardly have them - because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight! -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001489301
The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001510086
Let's hope the first comes first. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001531890
No one with seven books in New York City settles for one piece of ass. That's what you get for a couplet. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001532524
You be greater than your feelings. I don't demand this of you - life does. Otherwise you'll be washed away by feelings. You'll be washed out to sea and never seen again. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001541194
Look, I've got more personalities than I can use already. All you are is one too many. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001547381
vowing himself to "just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty." After -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001552005
No, I won't do it. I will not be locked into your head in this way. I will not participate in this drama for the sake of your fiction. Oh, darling, the hell with your fiction. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001560204
I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001562943
Opposing the father is no picnic and not opposing the father is no picnic - that's what he was discovering. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001564798
I'm so drunk my head doesn't even need my neck. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001572342
One either imposes one's ideas or one is imposed on. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001573701
Of course you may leave. That's how you cope with all your difficulties, Marcus - you leave. Has -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001574152
One price you pay for being taken for a god is the unabated dreaminess of your acolytes. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001579931
I left the front stoop on Leslie Street, ate of the fruit of the tree of fiction, and nothing, neither reality nor myself, has been the same since. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001580021
You put too much stock in intelligence," Marcia teased him. "It doesn't annihilate human nature." "That's -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001586660
You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001592750
Sometimes you're lucky and sometimes you're not. Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance - the tyranny of contingency - is everything. Chance is what I believed Mr. Cantor meant when he was decrying what he called God. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001595729
Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.
Interview in Esquire Magazine 10/10 -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001602352
Ordinarily my mother drew no strength from scorn, -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001607128
It's human to have a secret, but it's just as human to reveal it sooner or later. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001609087
It was puzzling to own trees - they were not owned the way a business os owned or even a house is owned. If anything, they were held in trust. In trust. Yes, for all of posterity, ... -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001610554
Do me a favor, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass_ I happen also to be a human being! -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001631257
There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness - not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001638211
Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001638524
I'm looking at myself," he said, ecstatically, "except it's you. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001641086
There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001648854
Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001677454
Everyone becomes a part of history whether they like it or not and whether they know it or not. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001679180
As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn't touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001680186
The most lethal of manmade explosives can't touch it. Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness. On May Day go out and march with your friends to its greater glory, the superpower of superpowers. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001682008
It's best to give while your hand is still warm. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001682635
The end is so immense, it is its own poetry. It requires little rhetoric. Just state it plainly. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001684397
Religion is the opiate of the people! -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001685000
Mark my words, Messner: the world is waiting, it's licking its chops, to take your boy away.'" "And my -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001689500
It's about life, where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences." "Oh, -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001696605
my imagination I am unfaithful to everybody, by the way, not just to you. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001700047
The loveliest fairy tale of childhood is that everything happens in order. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001701146
In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001705593
The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001707935
Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding? -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001718357
What do you do with the kid who can't read? ... Well, what he did with the kid who couldn't read was to make her his mistress. What Farley did was to make her his punching bag. What the Cuban did was to make her his whore, or one among them
so Coleman believed more often than not. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001733016
Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder- and nothing more -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001734968
The ordeal is part of the commitment
Esquire Interview 10/10 -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001736667
Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001738806
War with Canada was far less of an enigma to me than what Aunt Evelyn was going to use for a toilet during the night -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001758675
Anything can happen to anyone, but it usually doesn't. Except when it does. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001759275
You're our Marcel Proust, Mr. Zuckerman.
Zuckerman laughed. It wasn't exactly how he saw it. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001762233
Pain is like a baby crying. What it wants it can't name. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001764079
But by the third year he had come to wonder whether Laura's purpose wasn't the shield behind which he was still hiding his own, even from himself. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001770519
You know what I've come to realize about you kindly rich liberals who own the world? Nothing is further from your understanding than the nature of reality. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001770672
Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged
where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001771165
In America everything goes and nothing matters, while in Europe nothing goes and everything matters. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001782948
Their reasons for asking us to be both law-abiding and superior were not reasons we could find the conscience to discount, and so control that was close to absolute was ceded to adults who were striving and improving themselves through us. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001784672
And I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001786443
I did the best I could with what I had. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001788596
The ending is immense. Tell it plainly". -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001793820
The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001795946
Who are the new people when you do meet them? They're the same old people in masks.
There's nothing new about them at all. They're people. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001797207
Mamma, don't you see -- you shouldn't hit me. He shouldn't hit me. You shouldn't hit me about God, Mamma. You should never hit anybody about God . . . . -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001803999
With only adolescent introspection to light the way, each of us, hopelessly pubescent, alone and in secret, attempted to regulate -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001804139
This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001806251
When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001808106
Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001808388
A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001809383
They'll say, 'He never recovered from that breakdown and this was the result. It had to be the breakdown
not even he was that dreadful a novelist. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001820239
Great artists, as history reveals, have been harshly persecuted time and again by the frightened and ill-educated, -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001825973
There had to be forces outside. The prayer went, "Lead me not in temptation." If people were not led by others, why was the famous prayer that it was? -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001830885
As in life, I know only what is, and in death what is turns out to be what was. You -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001833689
I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001837588
It is not our high purposes alone that make us moving creatures, but our humble needs and cravings. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001839497
Should you protect profits? Yes. But run for the hills? No. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001841036
Memoirs lie, but fiction tells the truth. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001847283
YEvery man's endeavor was imbued with responsibility -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001853336
There is no you, Maria, any more than there is a me. There is only this way that we have established over the months of performing together, and what it is congruent with isn't "ourselves" but past performances
we're has-beens at heart, routinely trotting out the old, old act. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001859397
Why can't Jews with their Jewish problems be human beings with their human problems? -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001864744
If he were around this place as a professor, he could teach 'Appropriate Behavior in Classical Greek Drama,' a course that would be over before it began. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001868195
Too late, but I understand. That we don't perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that
of just that. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001870090
It's amazing how much punishment we can take. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001870091
In the ass is how you create loyalty. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001872011
The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy - that is every man's tragedy. -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001874289
A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant! -- Philip Roth
Philip Roth Quotes : pic 001874613
You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you. -- Philip Roth