Philip Roth Quotes

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

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.

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

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!

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

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

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.

I work just as much as I always worked. And I can't explain the fact that there have been a series of books coming rather regularly out of me. 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.

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

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.

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.

'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.

It's best to give while your hand is still warm.

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.

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.

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

When he is sick, every man wants his mother.

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.

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.

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.

For someone whose roots in America were strong but only inches deep, and who had no experience, such as a Catholic child might, of an awesome hierarchy that was real and felt, baseball was a kind of secular church that reached into every class and region of the nation and bound millions upon millions of us together in common concerns, loyalties, rituals, enthusiasms, and antagonisms. Baseball made me understand what patriotism was about, at its best.

You don't want to repeat yourself for one. You don't want to fall into the clichés for another. And you don't want to be licentious really. You want to be descriptive, if you can be. And you're not setting out to arouse anybody.

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.

People were standing up everywhere shouting, "This is me! This is me!" Every time you looked at them they stood up and told you who they were, and the truth of it was that they had no more idea who or what they were than he had. They believed their flashing signs, too. They ought to be standing up and shouting, "This isn't me! This isn't me!" They would if they had any decency. "This isn't me!" Then you might know how to proceed through the flashing bullshit of this world.

Doctor, I had never had anybody like her in my life, she was the fulfillment of my most lascivious adolescent dreams– but marry her, can she be serious? You see, for all her preening and perfumes, she has a very low opinion of herself, and simultaneously– and here is the source of much of our trouble-a ridiculously high opinion of me. And simultaneously, a very low opinion of me! She is one confused Monkey, and, I'm afraid, not too very bright.

I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.

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.

When I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on. 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.

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.

Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life.

I’m interested in what people do with the chaos in their lives and how they respond to it, and simultaneously what they do with what they feel like are limitations. If they push against these limitations, will they wind up in the realm of chaos, or will they push against limitations and wind up in the world of freedom?

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

Only in America, Rabbi Golden, 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 pedalpushers 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.

It's the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge.

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

We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen - there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark.

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.

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel- on the body of every Jewish child!- not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU'LL BE A PARENT AND YOU'LL KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE.

Let's hope the first comes first.

Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on. But routinely when I finish a book, I think, "What will I do? Where will I get an idea?" And a kind of low-level panic sets in. And then eventually something happens. I don't know. If I knew how it happened I would repeat the process, but I don't know - something just occurs to me.