Philip Roth Quotes - Page 4

Only in America, Rabbi Golden, do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedalpushers and mink stoles - and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn't their fault they were given a gift like speech - look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic.

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

Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.

I don't wish to be a slave any longer to the stringent exigencies of literature.

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

There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed.

Never in his life had occasion to ask himself, "Why are things the way they are?" Why should he bother, when the way they were was always perfect? Why are things the way they are? The question to which there is no answer, and up till then he was so blessed he didn't even know the question existed.

When he [Joe Lewis] was asked upon his retirement about his long career, Joe sweetly summed it up in just ten words. 'I did the best I could with what I had'.

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

Should you protect profits? Yes. But run for the hills? No.

Each book starts from ashes.

Let's hope the first comes first.

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

The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper.

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.

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.

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.

Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged -- where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.

As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn't touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing.

And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprintit’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania

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.

Doctor, I had never had anybody like her in my life, she was the fulfillment of my most lascivious adolescent dreams– but marry her, can she be serious? You see, for all her preening and perfumes, she has a very low opinion of herself, and simultaneously– and here is the source of much of our trouble-a ridiculously high opinion of me. And simultaneously, a very low opinion of me! She is one confused Monkey, and, I'm afraid, not too very bright.

I was gushing and I knew it. I surprised myself with my eagerness to please, felt myself saying too much, explaining too much, overinvolved and overexcited in the way you are when you're a kid and you think you've found a soul mate in the new boy down the street and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as you don't normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to.

You asked if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there's been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it's a way of life for them. It doesn't mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book — if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don't. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them.