Philip Roth

American Novelist

Lived from: 1933-

Quotes: Philip Roth

Quotes 1 till 15 of 70.

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Philip Roth

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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.
Philip Roth

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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.