Philip Roth Quotes

116 Sourced Quotes

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

Philip Roth
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.

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

Philip Roth
... 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
The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents.

Philip Roth
They [the young] are not no-longers, losing faculties, losing control, shamefully dispossessed from themselves, marked by deprivation and experiencing the organic rebellion staged by the body against the elderly; they are not-yets, with no idea how quickly things turn out another way.

Philip Roth
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
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
Doctor, my doctor, what do you say, let's put the id back in yid!

Philip Roth
Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.

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

Philip Roth
But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy—that is every man's tragedy.

Philip Roth
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

Philip Roth
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
In the eighties, a self-assured knucklehead whose unsurpassable hollowness and hackneyed sentiments and absolute blindness to every historical complexity became the object of national worship and, esteemed as a great communicator no less, won each of his two terms in a landslide.

Philip Roth
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
Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.

Philip Roth
When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it will be a great place.

Philip Roth
What if the world is some kind of—of show! … What if we are only talent assembled by the Great Talent Scout Up Above! The Great Show of Life! Starring Everybody! Suppose entertainment is the Purpose of Life!

Philip Roth
Family indivisibility, the first commandment.

Philip Roth
I was gushing and I knew it. I surprised myself with my eagerness to please, felt myself saying too much, explaining too much, overinvolved and overexcited in the way you are when you're a kid and you think you've found a soul mate in the new boy down the street and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as you don't normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to.

Philip Roth
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
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.

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

Philip Roth
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
It's amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces.

Philip Roth
He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach — that it makes no sense.

Philip Roth