Philip Roth Quotes

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.

The ordeal is part of the commitment
Esquire Interview 10/10

It is not our high purposes alone that make us moving creatures, but our humble needs and cravings.

A man who's discontents were barely known to himself, awakening in middle age to the horror of self-reflection.

Memoirs lie, but fiction tells the truth.

You've got a good girl this time. Don't screw it up. Don't let her go.

The end is so immense, it is its own poetry. It requires little rhetoric. Just state it plainly.

I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.

Old Blotnik had been mumbling so steadily for so many years, Ozzie suspected he had memorized the prayers and forgotten all about God. It

There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness - not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it.

Many farcical, illogical, incomprehensible transactions are subsumed by the mania of lust.

Self-laceration is never more than a memory away

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.

nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others

When he is sick, every man wants his mother.

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.

In America everything goes and nothing matters, while in Europe nothing goes and everything matters.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

So. Now you know the worst thing I have ever done. I fucked my own family's dinner.

Everyone becomes a part of history whether they like it or not and whether they know it or not.

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?

You don't have to work in a mental hospital to know about husbands and wives.

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface

The question to ask about the writer isn't 'Why does he behave so badly?' but 'What does he gain by wearing this mask?

The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.

If you don't know the fantasy life of a country, it's hard to write fiction about it.

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.

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

There's something every woman wants, and that's a man to blame.

As far as I can see there is no conquering or exorcising the past with words - words born either of imagination or forthrightness.

Simple is never that simple.

I'm so drunk my head doesn't even need my neck.

With only adolescent introspection to light the way, each of us, hopelessly pubescent, alone and in secret, attempted to regulate

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.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art.

The ending is immense. Tell it plainly".

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 ...

Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it.

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.

For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence.

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.

There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed.

And I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again.

A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

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.

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?

YEvery man's endeavor was imbued with responsibility

People think of history in the long term, but history, in fact, it's a very sudden thing.

A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!

There are no uncontaminated angels

He was no more, freed from
being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.

Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder- and nothing more

Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.

This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.

Why, emotionally, is a man of his type reciprocally connected to a woman of her type? The usual reason: their flaws fit.

Nothing keeps its promise.

When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

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.

How much time could you spend staring out the ocean, even if it was the ocean you'd loved since you were a boy?

Human conduct can be regulated, and it will be regulated! The

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 ...

Mark my words, Messner: the world is waiting, it's licking its chops, to take your boy away.'" "And my

Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.

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.

Great artists, as history reveals, have been harshly persecuted time and again by the frightened and ill-educated,

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!

Nothing is more uplifting in all of life than righteous anger.

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.

LaHill was a dark, burly fellow whose hair curled out of his clothes wherever it could.

He was trying hard to continue to exist as himself despite the unlikeliness of everything.

You're our Marcel Proust, Mr. Zuckerman.
Zuckerman laughed. It wasn't exactly how he saw it.

You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.

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

It's no picnic up there in the egosphere.

What is astonishing is that we, who had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happened.

What I wanted was the tiniest thing in the world: to be like everyone else.

(Writing is) the transformation, through an elaborate impersonation, of a personal emergency into a public act (in both senses of that word).

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.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.

Don't care why we have it, we are here to admit that we have it and help each other get rid of it.

Nathan called all shiksas Maria
the explanation seemed as ludicrously simple as that.

Anything can happen to anyone, but it usually doesn't. Except when it does.

All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

Do me a favor, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass_ I happen also to be a human being!

Would that I were still a ludicrous character in his lousy book!

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.

Even when she was dressed up she didn't look like a chosen person.

my imagination I am unfaithful to everybody, by the way, not just to you.

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.

Religion is the opiate of the people!

Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.

In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees

There was a mattress, discolored and waterlogged, like a cartoon-strip drunk slumped against a pole.

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?

Each book starts from ashes.

You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.