Philip Roth Quotes

You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.

I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.

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

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.

Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them--at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them.

We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper.

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

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

How Far back must we go to discover the beginning of trouble?

I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.

Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged -- where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.

Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid

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

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

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.

I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.

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

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again.

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

When he [Joe Lewis] was asked upon his retirement about his long career, Joe sweetly summed it up in just ten words. 'I did the best I could with what I had'.

Each book starts from ashes.

Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it.

If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.

The ordeal is part of the commitment" Esquire Interview 10/10

One either imposes one's ideas or one is imposed on.

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.

The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

It's human to have a secret, but it's just as human to reveal it sooner or later.

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

--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others

The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy ? that is every man?s tragedy.

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

Let's hope the first comes first.

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

The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.

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.

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.

The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

Eventually the writing takes time. What I want to do is get the story down and I want to know what happens as I write my way into the knowledge of the story.

He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.

I don't wish to be a slave any longer to the stringent exigencies of literature.

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

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism!

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.

The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel- on the body of every Jewish child!- not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU'LL BE A PARENT AND YOU'LL KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE.

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

The signore...wishes her to begin at the beginning.

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

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

There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed.