"There's something every woman wants, and that's a man to blame."
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Quote collection
Philip Roth quotes (page 3 of 9)
167 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets — no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!"
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"Too late, but I understand. That we don't perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that -- of just that."
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"A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way."
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"Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it."
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"There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies."
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"Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!"
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"You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature."
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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!"
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"To become a celebrity is to become a brand name. There is Ivory Soap, Rice Krispies, and Philip Roth. Ivory is the soap that floats; Rice Krispies the breakfast cereal that goes snap-crackle-pop; Philip Roth the Jew who masturbates with a piece of liver."
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"You go to someone and you think, 'I'll tell him this.' But why? The impulse is that the telling is going to relieve you. And that's why you feel awful later--you've relieved yourself, and if it truly is tragic and awful, it's not better, it's worse---the exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse."
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"Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive."
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"It's amazing how much punishment we can take."
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"Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life."
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"There’s no remaking reality... Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There’s no other way."
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"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."
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"It's absolutely fantastic. When I was a kid, my father was always trying to tell me how to be a man, and he said to me, I was maybe 9, and he said to me, 'Philip, whenever you take a nap, take your clothes off, put a blanket on you, and you're going to sleep better.' Well, as with everything, he was right. ... Then the best part of it is that when you wake up, for the first 15 seconds, you have no idea where you are. You're just alive. That's all you know. And it's bliss, it's absolute bliss."
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"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."
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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."
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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."
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