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Philip Roth
76 quotes
“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Works in Progress" in The New York Times Book Review (15 July 1979), page BR1
“When you publish a book, it’s the world’s book. The world edits it.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Visit with Philip Roth," interview with James Atlas, The New York Times Book Review (2 September 1979), p. BR1
“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.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Ghosts of Roth," interview with Alan Finkielkraut, Esquire (September 1981)
“This indictment is a kind of fever that flares up from time to time. It flared up after "Defender of the Faith," again after "Goodbye Columbus," and understandably it went way up — to about 107 — after "Portnoy's Complaint." Now there's just a low-grade fever running, nothing to worry about.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On criticism of his writing, as quoted in "The Unbounded Spirit of Philip Roth", interview with Mervyn Rothstein, The New York Times (1 August 1985), Late City Final Edition, section C, page 13, column 1
“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.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Deception: A Novel (1990)
“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.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Deception: A Novel (1990)
“I'm exactly the opposite of religious, I'm anti-religious. I find religious people hideous. I hate the religious lies. It's all a big lie. … I have such a huge dislike. It's not a neurotic thing, but the miserable record of religion. I don't even want to talk about it, it's not interesting to talk about the sheep referred to as believers. When I write, I'm alone. It's filled with fear and loneliness and anxiety — and I never needed religion to save me.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Martin Krasnik The Guardian (14 December 2005)
“When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it will be a great place.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview on CBS, 3 October 2010, Philip Roth on Fame, Sex, and God CBS News (3 October 2010)
“I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Roth on Trump" by Judith Thurman, in The New Yorker (30 January 2017), p. 17
“Oh Patimkin! Fruit grew in their refrigerator and sporting goods dropped from their trees!”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[H]er breasts swam towards me like two pink-nosed fish and she let me hold them.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life was a throwing off for poor aunt Gladys, her greatest joys were taking out the garbage, emptying the pantry, and making threadbare bundles for what she still refers to as the poor Jews of Palestine.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The concerns of fiction, let it be said, are not those of a statistician — or of a public-relations firm. The novelist asks himself, "What do people think?"; the PR man asks, "What will people think?”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All the tolerance of persecution that has seeped into the Jewish character — the adaptability, the patience, the resignation, the silence, the self-denial — must be squeezed out, until the only response there is to any restriction of liberties is "No, I refuse.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, "Momma, do we believe in winter?”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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!”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am thirteen. At long last, not a cored apple. Not an empty milk bottle greased with vaseline, but a girl in a slip, with two tits and a cunt — and a mustache, but who am I to be picky.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm not trying to turn you into a bourgeois, Naomi. If the bed is too luxurious, we can do it on the floor.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...and then this amazing creature — to whom no one has ever said "Shah!" or "I only hope your children will do the same to you someday!”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property — on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dreams? If only they had been! But I don't need dreams, Doctor, that's why I hardly have them — because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight!”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can lie about my name, I can lie about my school, but how am I going to lie about this fucking nose? "You seem like a very nice person Mr. Porte-Noir, but why do you go around covering the middle of your face like that?" Because suddenly it has taken off, the middle of my face! Because gone is the button of my childhood years, that pretty little thing that people used to look at in my carriage, and lo and behold, the middle of my face has begun to reach out towards God. Porte-Noir and Parsons my ass, kid, you have got J-E-W written right across the middle of your face.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“England’s made a Jew of me in only eight weeks, which, on reflection, might be the least painful method. 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.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self .... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself — a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required .... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they're actually trying to find out, "Is he as crazy as I am?" I don't need that question answered.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know, the dirty little secret is no longer sex; the dirty little secret is hatred and rage. It's the tirade that's taboo. Odd that this should be so a hundred years after Dostoyevsky (and fifty after Freud), but nobody nice likes to be identified with the stuff. It's the way folks used to feel about fellatio in the good old days. "Me? Never heard of it. Disgusting." But is it "hostile," really, to take a look at the ferocity of the emotion they call "hostility"?”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was trying to solve the problem of this book. (My Life as a Man) When it seemed I never would, I stopped and wrote Our Gang; when I tried again and still couldn't write it, I stopped and wrote the baseball book; then while finishing the baseball book, I stopped to write The Breast. It was as though I were blasting my way through a tunnel to reach the novel I couldn't write. Each of one's books is a blast, clearing the way for what's next.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They boo you, they whistle, they stamp their feet — you hate it but you thrive on it. Because the things that wear you down are the things that nurture you and your talent.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And 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 (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out? Does anyone find anyone that enchanting unless they have sexual business with them? Who else are you enchanted by? Nobody.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The jealously. That poison. And unprovoked. Jealous even when she tells me she's going ice-skating with her eighteen-year-old brother.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You too need the lecture on the childishness of coupling? Of course it's childish. Family life is, today more than ever, when the ethos is created substantially by the children. It's even worse when there are no children around. Because the childish adult replaces the child. Coupled life and family life bring out everything that's childish in everyone involved. Why do they have to sleep night after night in the same bed? Why must they be on the phone to each other five times a day? Why are they always with each other? The forced deference is certainly childish. The unnatural deference.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now, I'm very vulnerable to female beauty, as you know. Everybody's defenseless against something, and that's it for me. I see it and it blinds me to everything else. They come to my first class, and I know almost immediately which is the girl for me. There is a Mark Twain story in which he runs from a bull, and the bull looks up to him when he's hiding in a tree, and the bull thinks, "You are my meat, sir." Well, that "sir" is transformed into "young lady" when I see them in class.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That body is still new to her, she's still trying it out, thinking it through, a bit like a kid walking the streets with a loaded gun and deciding whether he's packing it to protect himself or to begin a life of crime.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Turned the wrong way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Monty was the most overbearing of my uncles, which probably accounted for why he was also the richest.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because what’s history?” he asked rhetorically when he was in his expansive dinnertime instructional mode. “History is everything that happens everywhere. Even here in Newark. Even here on Summit Avenue. Even what happens in his house to an ordinary man—that’ll be history too someday.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He tell us that in a democracy, keeping abreast of current events was a citizen’s most important duty and that you could never start too early to be informed about the news of the day.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Probably I couldn’t have done any worse—I might well have done a lot better—seeking solace from the two nuns on the Lyons Avenue bus than from someone reveling in the pleasures of the standard, petty corruptions that proliferate wherever people compete for even the tiniest advantages of rank.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s a plot afoot all right, and I’ll gladly name the forces propelling it—hysteria, ignorance, malice, stupidity, hatred, and fear. What a repugnant spectacle our country has become! Falsehood, cruelty, and madness everywhere, and brute force in the wings waiting to finish us off.”
Philip Roth (1933–2018) said by 2018 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source