Philip Roth Quotes

American
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Novelist
Born: March 19, 1933

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

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.
Philip Roth

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.
Philip Roth

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

Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.
Philip Roth

The novelist's obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word.
Philip Roth

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

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

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

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

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

I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care.
Philip Roth

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

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

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

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

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

With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two years your life stopped. If you had been running in the direction of your life, you had to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain boring.
Philip Roth

A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.
Philip Roth

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

Nothing keeps its promise.
Philip Roth

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

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

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

All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.
Philip Roth

I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.
Philip Roth

Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.
Philip Roth

For all I know, I am beginning with the ending. My page one can wind up a year later as page two hundred, if it's still even around.
Philip Roth

I work all day, morning and afternoon, just about every day. If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book.
Philip Roth

My traducers propound my alleged malefaction as though I have spewed venom on women for half a century. But only a madman would go to the trouble of writing 31 books in order to affirm his hatred.
Philip Roth

As for the kind of writer I am? I am who I don't pretend to be.
Philip Roth

As I see it, my focus has never been on masculine power rampant and triumphant but rather on the antithesis: masculine power impaired.
Philip Roth

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.
Philip Roth