Philip Roth Quotes (39 Quotes)

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

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

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

Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? 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 consideration, getting them wrong again.

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,...

Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.

Memories particularly of when they weren't being what parents are nine-tenths of the time, the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the nags of pick-that-up and you're-going-to-be-late, keepers of the diary of her duties and routines, memories, rather, of when they found one another afresh, beyond the tensions between parental mastery and inept childish uncertainty, of those moments of respite in a family's life when they could reach one another in calm

That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration

That people were manifold creatures didn't come as a surprise to the Swede, even if it was a bit of a shock to realize it anew when someone let you down. What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for

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. Maybe the best thing would be to forget about being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that-well, lucky you.

Where was the Jew in him? You couldn't find it and yet you knew it was there. Where was the irrationality in him? Where was the crybaby in him? Where were the wayward temptations? No guile. No artifice. No mischief. All that he had eliminated to achieve his perfection. No striving, no ambivalence, no doubleness- just the style, the natural physical refinement of a star.

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.

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

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.

Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress-probably had never even begun to see into himself

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

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.

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

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.

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.

A kind of fever that flares up from time to time. . . . flared up again . . . to about 107 . . . Now there's just a low-grade fever running, nothing to worry about.

Only in America do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedal pushers and mink stoles -- and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn't their fault they were given a gift like speech -- look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic.

When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters

There's no way in hell cash is about to come roaring back into the market.

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.

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

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

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.

History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

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.

The long haul kind of wearies me, the thought of doing a book for two or three or years and you have to rule so much else out of your life. I always knew that literature satisfied a taste for considering life in a certain way, but that it wasn't a guide to living.

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.

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.

Should you protect profits? Yes. But run for the hills? No.

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

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

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

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

Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.