Philip Roth Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Philip Roth

Philip Roth Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Philip Roth quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends. — Philip Roth

The ordeal is part of the commitment
Esquire Interview 10/10 — Philip Roth

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

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

The pompous son of a bitch knows everythingit's too bad he doesn't know anything else. — Philip Roth

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

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

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

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

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

Self-laceration is never more than a memory away — Philip Roth

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

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

When he is sick, every man wants his mother. — Philip Roth

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

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

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

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

The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you. — Philip Roth

Why can't Jews with their Jewish problems be human beings with their human problems? — Philip Roth

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

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

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

Writing is like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time. — Philip Roth

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

Let's hope the first comes first. — Philip Roth

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 is a good writer, but I wouldn't want to shake hands with him. — Jacqueline Susann

Steeped like a teabag in aristocratic pretensions ... — Philip Roth

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

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

Old age isn't a battle: old age is a massacre. — Philip Roth

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

YEvery man's endeavor was imbued with responsibility — Philip Roth

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

One either imposes one's ideas or one is imposed on. — Philip Roth

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

Either foreswear fucking others or the affair is over. — Philip Roth

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

Nothing keeps its promise. — Philip Roth

It's about life, where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences." "Oh, — Philip Roth

How Far back must we go to discover the beginning of trouble? — Philip Roth

The most enviable genius in literary history is the guy who invented alphabet soup: nobody knows who he is. — Philip Roth

Human conduct can be regulated, and it will be regulated! The — Philip Roth

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

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

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

You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you. — Philip Roth

There are no uncontaminated angels — Philip Roth

The only patient being treated by the writer is himself — Philip Roth

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

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

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

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

Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder- and nothing more — Philip Roth

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

The horror of being caged has lost its thrill. — Philip Roth

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

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

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material. — Philip Roth

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

The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction. — Philip Roth

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

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

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

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

Simple is never that simple. — Philip Roth

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

Being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on. — Philip Roth

I did the best I could with what I had. — Philip Roth

If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really. — Philip Roth

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense. — Philip Roth

Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown. — Philip Roth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even a monster has to be from somewhere - even a monster needs parents. But parents don't need monsters. — Philip Roth

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

One has periods of ghastliness. And then long periods of sort of quiet and love. — Philip Roth

The book really comes to life in the rewriting. — Philip Roth

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

People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun. — Philip Roth

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

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

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

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

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

The phallic dignity, of a powerhouse of a warrior prince, is how the great imaginative literature of Europe begins, — Philip Roth

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

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

The ending is immense. Tell it plainly". — Philip Roth

Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art. — Philip Roth

I don't know anybody. I turn sentences around, and that's it. — Philip Roth

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

Of course you may leave. That's how you cope with all your difficulties, Marcus - you leave. Has — Philip Roth

Now that he was no longer grounded in his hate, we were going to talk about women. — Philip Roth