Philip Roth Quotes

yEvery man's endeavor was imbued with responsibility

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

Every man's endeavor was imbued with responsibility

The Jewish man with parents still alive is a fifteen-year-old boy and will remain a fifteen-year-old...

Alvin didn't cry, didn't curse, didn't holler.... He was too far gone to roar on that day or even to...

A Jewish man with parents alive is a 15-year-old boy and will remain a 15-year-old boy until they d...

She thinks, I'm telling him who I am. He's interested in who I am. That is true, but I am curious ab...

I work all day, morning and afternoon, just about every day. If I sit there like that for two or thr...

Not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized--that ...

There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinheim, remorseless about thei...

...I realized that my father, of all these men, was the most obstinate, helplessly bonded to his bet...

I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a pic...

In my parents' day and age, it used to be the person who fell short. Now it's the discipline. Readin...

Stunned by how little he'd gotten over her and she'd gotten over him, he walked away understanding, ...

There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his be...

It is not our high purposes alone that make us moving creatures, but our humble needs and cravings.

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

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

The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves...

These girls with old gents don't do it despite the age—they're drawn to the age, they do it for the ...

This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates h...

Yes, yes, yes, he felt uncontrollable tenderness for his own shit-filled life. And a laughable hunge...

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

I can lie about my name, I can lie about my school, but how am I going to lie about this fucking nos...

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

Well, good Christ, how was I supposed to know all that, Hannah? Who looks into the fine points when ...

In school we chanted, along with our teacher, I am the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my sou...

I understood that people are trying to transform themselves all the time: the universal urge to be o...

Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind.

Where everything is words, you'd think I'd have some mastery and know my way around, but all this ch...

You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you th...

Is that what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime's minutiae? Who could have imagined that one w...

other people's weakness can destroy you just as much as their strength can. Weak people are not harm...

Look, everything the Communists say about capitalism is true, and everything the capitalists say abo...

None of us ate together: my Aunt Gladys ate at five o’clock, my cousin Susan at five-thirty, me at s...

What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly be so much to say — so much so pressing that...

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

What are you? Do you know? What you are is you're always trying to smooth everything over. What you ...

This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compass...

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unabl...

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

A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an arm...

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

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

Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the do...

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

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you...

Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is form...

Old age isn't a battle old age is a massacre.

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.Interview in Esquire Mag...

In America everything goes and nothing matters, while in Europe nothing goes and everything matters.

One’s story isn’t a skin to be shed— it’s inescapable, one’s body and blood. You go on pumping it ou...

I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere t...

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

True, he had chosen to live alone, but not unbearably alone. The worst of being unbearably alone was...

How much time could you spend staring out the ocean, even if it was the ocean you'd loved since you ...

Simple is never that simple.

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expec...

And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they ...

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

A man who's discontents were barely known to himself, awakening in middle age to the horror of self-...

That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they w...

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them...

a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way an...

Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of i...

Simple was never that simple. Still, the self-questioning did take some time to reach him. And if th...

Writting turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get ir right someday ...

Memories particularly of when they weren’t being what parents are nine-tenths of the time, the taskm...

You fight your superficiality, you shallowness, as as to come at people without unreal expectations,...

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

Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our e...

He was trying hard to continue to exist as himself despite the unlikeliness of everything.

Within five minutes of leaving the reunion, I'd undone the double wrapping and eaten all six rugelac...