Philip Roth Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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Family indivisibility, the first commandment.

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

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

Philip Roth
How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard.

Philip Roth
Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder- and nothing more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philip Roth
A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!

Philip Roth
For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.

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

Philip Roth
Being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

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

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

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

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

Philip Roth
You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.

Philip Roth
... her breasts swam towards me like two pink-nosed fish and she let me hold them.

Philip Roth
Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body.

Philip Roth
I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.

Philip Roth
It's the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge.

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

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

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

Philip Roth
Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown.

Philip Roth