Philip Roth famous quotes

You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.
-- Philip Roth

#Love You #Telling The Truth #Force

The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.
-- Philip Roth

#Thrill #Horror #Lost

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

#Lessons #Worst #Teach

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.
-- Philip Roth

#Reading #Noise #Fiction

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.
-- Philip Roth

#Maps #Body #Toes

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

#Writing #Progress #Hell

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

#Battle #Age #Massacres

The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open.
-- Philip Roth

#Love #Fall #Thinking

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

#Fun #Games #Faces

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.
-- Philip Roth

#Lying #Writing #Thinking

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.
-- Philip Roth

#Materials

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

#World #Novelists #Easier

You tasted it. Isn't that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That's all we're given in life, that's all we're given of life. A taste. There is no more.
-- Philip Roth

#Taste #Enough #Given

It's best to give while your hand is still warm.
-- Philip Roth

#Hands #Giving #Stills

There are no uncontaminated angels
-- Philip Roth

#Angel

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

#Too Much #Human Nature #Humans

Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.
-- Philip Roth

#Silence #Mind #Literature

Everyone becomes a part of history whether they like it or not and whether they know it or not.
-- Philip Roth

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

#Playfulness #Seriousness

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

#Dark #Goes On #Convince

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

#Literature #Mess

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

#Fun #People #Unjust

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

#Knowing #Entering

a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.
-- Philip Roth

#Jobs #Father #Ambition

When I was a child... I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'
-- Philip Roth

#Children #Believe #Winter

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

#Hatred #Danger #Hundred

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

#Memories #Past #Imagination

Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. 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

#Morning #Jobs #Real

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

#Responsibility #Thinking #Make You Think

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

#Life Is #Easy #Easy Life

Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.
-- Philip Roth

#Writing #Wrecks #May

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.
-- Philip Roth

#Feelings #Phrases #Said

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

#Alive #Life Is #Periods

The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.
-- Philip Roth

#Rooms #Pleasure #Persons

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

#Communication #Ducks #Bombs

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

#Memories #Biographies #Bones

Turned the wrong way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied in "History", harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.
-- Philip Roth

#Epic #Pages #Way

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

#Writing #Alive #Pages

You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.
-- Philip Roth

#People #Ideology

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.
-- Philip Roth

#Writing #Judging

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

#Greed #Volatility #Decline

I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.
-- Philip Roth

#Commitment #Writing #Use

Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art.
-- Philip Roth

#Art #Humor #Moral

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

#Smart #Writing #Fiction

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

#War #Order #Political