Philip Roth Quotes

116 Sourced Quotes

Why must he mistrust his life just when he was more its master than he'd been in years?.

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

Philip Roth
So [said the doctor]. Now vee may perhaps to begin Yes?

Philip Roth
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
Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I'm living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in the Jewish joke—only it ain't no joke!

Philip Roth
The radio was playing "Easter Parade" and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin "Easter Parade" and "White Christmas."... Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.

Philip Roth
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
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.

Philip Roth
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
You be greater than your feelings. I don't demand this of you - life does. Otherwise you'll be washed away by feelings. You'll be washed out to sea and never seen again.

Philip Roth
In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees

Philip Roth
You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.

Philip Roth
I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off – the sticky evidence is everywhere!

Philip Roth
This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.

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

Philip Roth
When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters. This isn't to say I wished to change places. I didn't envy their persecution and the way in which it heightens their social importance. I didn't even envy them their seemingly more valuable and serious themes. The trivialization, in the West, of much that's deadly serious in the East is itself a subject, one requiring considerable imaginative ingenuity to transform into compelling fiction.

Philip Roth
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
You go to someone and you think, 'I'll tell him this.' But why? The impulse is that the telling is going to relieve you. And that's why you feel awful later—you've relieved yourself, and if it truly is tragic and awful, it's not better, it's worse—the exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse.

Philip Roth
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
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...

Philip Roth
There's something every woman wants, and that's a man to blame.

Philip Roth
World War III will be triggered off not by suppressed nationalists seeking political independence, as happened the first time around when the Serbs at Sarajevo shot the heir to the Austrian throne, but by some semiliterate, whacked-out "loner" who lobs a rocket into a nuclear arsenal in order to impress Brooke Shields.

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

Philip Roth
I do not say correct or savory. I do not say seemly or even natural. I say serious. Sensationally serious. Unspeakably serious. Solemnly, recklessly, blissfully serious.

Philip Roth
For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence.

Philip Roth