Philip Roth Quotes

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

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

All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

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

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.

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.

Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.

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.

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.

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

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.

There's something every woman wants, and that's a man to blame.

Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

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

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

It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces.

When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.

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

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.

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

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.

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.

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.

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