Top 100 Philip Roth Quotes
#1. Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I'll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.
Dinaw Mengestu
#2. I enjoy a misogynist so long as they have a wicked sense of humor and know, on some level, that they're pigs. This is why I enjoy Philip Roth but not Saul Bellow or James Salter.
Heidi Julavits
#3. A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal.
John Updike
#4. I was enamored of New York City intellectual life and was really into Philip Roth because I was raised by self-loathing Midwesterners who were from southern Illinois, who felt like fish out of water when they came to the East Coast when I was a kid.
Meghan Daum
#5. They probably don't really like pale skin but they certainly like walking into a store without some security dude following them. Hating Your Goy and Eating One Too, as the great Philip Roth put it. So if everyone in America aspires to be WASPs, then what do WASPs aspire to? Does anyone know?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#6. There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.
Ruth Rendell
#7. 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
#8. It was a pastiche of public library porn from Irving Stone to Philip Roth.
Nell Zink
#9. Don't tell me he's bisexual! Don't tell me this is more of the guy in the hallway! Don't tell me he wants us to have it off together, Philip Roth fucking Philip Roth! That, I'm afraid, is a form of masturbation too fancy even for me.
Philip Roth
#10. Philip Roth is a good writer, but I wouldn't want to shake hands with him.
Jacqueline Susann
#11. Philip Roth is a fabulous writer, but he pretty much stays within his own life. He's so good - I mean, practically anything I've ever read of his I've really enjoyed. He just has tremendous talent. But I think he should have given himself a break and gone deeper into the society.
Tom Wolfe
#12. I loved this smart, funny, big-hearted novel. As hilarious and wise as early Philip Roth, The Mathematician's Shiva will delight and move you.
Steven Strogatz
#13. Fiorito has all the right stuff. His splendid memoir about his relationship with his dying father belongs on that small shelf with Philip Roth's Patrimony and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.
Mordecai Richler
#14. Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.
Cynthia Ozick
#15.
nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others
Philip Roth
#16. When he is sick, every man wants his mother.
Philip Roth
#17. 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.
Philip Roth
#18. so conspicuous was his abhorrence of "rebellious insolence" that he might have been enunciating the name of a menace resolved to undermine not just Winesburg, Ohio, but the great republic itself.
Philip Roth
#19. 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
#20. Could he continue to maintain his sanity that long? He didn't know. That's why he was devouring two or three books a day - to remove himself every minute that he possibly could from the madness of this life.
Philip Roth
#21. The only patient being treated by the writer is himself
Philip Roth
#22. I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.
Philip Roth
#23. I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.
Philip Roth
#24. 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.
Philip Roth
#25. Everyone thinks at some time or other that in a hundred years no one now alive will be on earth - the overwhelming force will sweep the place clean.
Philip Roth
#26. How Far back must we go to discover the beginning of trouble?
Philip Roth
#27. How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard.
Philip Roth
#28. Spring me from this role I play of the smothered son in the Jewish joke! Because it's beginning to pall a little at thirty-three!
Philip Roth
#29. 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
#30. It was my job not just to pluck the chickens but to eviscerate them. I hated that part. Nauseating and disgusting, but it had to be done. That's what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do.
Philip Roth
#31. When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
Philip Roth
#32. In short, dozens of conflicting, truncated impressions were already teasing to be understood, but the wisest course seemed to me to keep them to myself so long as I didn't begin to know what they added up to.
Philip Roth
#33. 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
#34. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.
Philip Roth
#35. My God, he thought, the man I once was!
The life that surrounded me! The force that was mine! No "otherness" to be felt anywhere! Once upon a time I was a full human being.
Philip Roth
#36. Ordinarily my mother drew no strength from scorn,
Philip Roth
#37. At a certain stage of misery, you'll try anything to explain what's going on with you, even if you know it doesn't explain a thing and it's one failed explanation after another.
Philip Roth
#38. You don't have to work in a mental hospital to know about husbands and wives.
Philip Roth
#39. When, with a smile, she let the dirt slip slowly across her curled palm and out the side of her hand onto the coffin, the gesture looked like the prelude to a carnal act. Clearly this was a man to whom she'd once given much thought.
Philip Roth
#40. I would quit while you're ahead. Really. It's an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and you write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it's not any good. I would say just stop now. You don't want to do this to yourself. That's my advice to you.
Philip Roth
#41. 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.
Philip Roth
#42. As for God, it was easy to think kindly of Him in a paradise like Indian Hill. It was something else in Newark - or Europe or the Pacific - in the summer of 1944.
Philip Roth
#44. The most enviable genius in literary history is the guy who invented alphabet soup: nobody knows who he is.
Philip Roth
#45. Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.
Philip Roth
#46. You tasted it. Isn't that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That's all we're given in life, that's all we're given of life. A taste. There is no more.
Philip Roth
#47. The joy of awakening each morning knowing there were all those empty hours ahead to be filled only with work.
Philip Roth
#48. I don't know anybody. I turn sentences around, and that's it.
Philip Roth
#49. Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind.
Philip Roth
#50. If he were around this place as a professor, he could teach 'Appropriate Behavior in Classical Greek Drama,' a course that would be over before it began.
Philip Roth
#51. It's amazing how much punishment we can take.
Philip Roth
#52. He was trying hard to continue to exist as himself despite the unlikeliness of everything.
Philip Roth
#53. You put too much stock in intelligence," Marcia teased him. "It doesn't annihilate human nature." "That's
Philip Roth
#54. Self-laceration is never more than a memory away
Philip Roth
#55. Nothing is more uplifting in all of life than righteous anger.
Philip Roth
#56. Nathan called all shiksas Maria
the explanation seemed as ludicrously simple as that.
Philip Roth
#57. 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.
Philip Roth
#58. 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
#59. How can one say, 'No, this isn't a part of life,' since it always is? The contaminant of sex, the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are.
Philip Roth
#60. Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid
Philip Roth
#61. What I wanted was the tiniest thing in the world: to be like everyone else.
Philip Roth
#62. It's no picnic up there in the egosphere.
Philip Roth
#63. 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
#64. One has periods of ghastliness. And then long periods of sort of quiet and love.
Philip Roth
#65. Of a terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices archive the most disproportionate result.
Philip Roth
#66. 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
#67. 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.
Philip Roth
#68. Play the moment, play whatever plays for you in that moment, and then go to the next moment. It doesn't matter where you're going. Don't worry about that. Just take it moment, moment, moment, moment.
Philip Roth
#69. The signore ... wishes her to begin at the beginning.
Philip Roth
#70. To become a new being. To bifurcate. The drama that underlies America's story, the high drama that is upping and leaving-and the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands. - p. 342
Philip Roth
#71. Memoirs lie, but fiction tells the truth.
Philip Roth
#72. 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
#73. Zuckerman, sucker though he was for seriousness, was still not going to be drawn into a discussion about agents and editors. If ever there was a reason for an American writer to seek asylum in Red China, it would be to put ten thousand miles between himself and those discussions.
Philip Roth
#74. My father believes not what he sees with his eyes for an entire lifetime, instead he believes what he's told by the plumber on his knees fixing the toilet in the back of the store!" I couldn't stop. He'd been driven crazy by the chance remark of a plumber! "Yeah,
Philip Roth
#75. What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel.
Philip Roth
#76. The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.
Philip Roth
#77. Simple was never that simple. Still, the self-questioning did take some time to reach him. And if there's anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it's self-questioning coming too late.
Philip Roth
#78. Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews.
Philip Roth
#79. The only way to have a funeral is to invite everyone who ever knew the person and just wait for the accident to happen-somebody who comes in out of the blue and says the truth. Everything else is table manners.
Philip Roth
#80. If he had another brother he would call him. But for a brother he has only Jerry and Jerry has only him. For a daughter he has only Merry. For a father she has only him. There is no way around any of this.
Philip Roth
#81. In school we chanted, along with our teacher, I am the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my soul, and meanwhile, within my own body, an anarchic insurrection had been launched by one of my privates- which I was helpless to put down!
Philip Roth
#82. Human conduct can be regulated, and it will be regulated! The
Philip Roth
#83. Because you happen to be a writer doesn't mean you have to deny yourself the ordinary human pleasure of being praised and applauded.
Philip Roth
#84. Either foreswear fucking others or the affair is over.
Philip Roth
#85. 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.
Philip Roth
#86. There was a mattress, discolored and waterlogged, like a cartoon-strip drunk slumped against a pole.
Philip Roth
#87. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really.
Philip Roth
#88. I'm looking at myself," he said, ecstatically, "except it's you.
Philip Roth
#89. In America everything goes and nothing matters, while in Europe nothing goes and everything matters.
Philip Roth
#90. Is that what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime's minutiae? Who could have imagined that one would have forever to remember each moment of life down to its tiniest component?
Philip Roth
#91. In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees
Philip Roth
#92. I'm the only one who gives her a whole can of tuna for lunch, and I'm not talking dreck, either. I'm talking Chicken of the Sea, Alex.
Philip Roth
#93. But may I ask, Marcus, merely out of curiosity, how you manage to get by in life - filled as our lives inevitably are with trial and tribulation - lacking religious or spiritual guidance?" "I get straight A's, sir.
Philip Roth
#94. Of course you may leave. That's how you cope with all your difficulties, Marcus - you leave. Has
Philip Roth
#96. One price you pay for being taken for a god is the unabated dreaminess of your acolytes.
Philip Roth
#97. 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
#98. It's best to give while your hand is still warm.
Philip Roth
#99. All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.
Philip Roth
#100. Not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized--that was the dream of his life.
Philip Roth
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
