Philip Roth Quotes
Collection of 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.
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
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
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
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
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
when the result is to wind up so far behind? — 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
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
There's nothing new about them at all. They're people. — Philip Roth
Either foreswear fucking others or the affair is over.
— Philip Roth
Nothing keeps its promise.
— Philip Roth
The most enviable genius in literary history is the guy who invented alphabet soup: nobody knows who he is.
— 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
at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them. — 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
He was no more, freed from
being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start. — Philip Roth
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
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
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
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
I did the best I could with what I had.
— 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
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
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
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
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
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