Philip Roth

American Novelist

Lived from: 1933-

Quotes: Philip Roth

Quotes 1 till 15 of 70.

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  A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.

• Philip Roth

  

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  A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!

• Philip Roth

  

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  Each book starts from ashes.

• Philip Roth

  

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  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.

• Philip Roth

  

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  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

  

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

• Philip Roth

  

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  Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind.
  Source: Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993)

• Philip Roth

  

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  He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.
  Source: American Pastoral

• Philip Roth

  

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

• Philip Roth

  

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  I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off – the sticky evidence is everywhere!
  Source: Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

• Philip Roth

  

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  I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.
  Source: Exit Ghost (2007)

• Philip Roth

  

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  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.

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  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

  

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  I know I'm not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation.

• Philip Roth

  

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

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