"One either imposes one's ideas or one is imposed on."
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Quote collection
Philip Roth quotes (page 6 of 9)
167 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really."
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"Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it."
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"The ordeal is part of the commitment" Esquire Interview 10/10"
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"When I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on. And then, especially with the help of the computer, rewriting is so easy to do with the computer, much easier than it used to be with the typewriter. So the books go through numerous drafts."
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"The book really comes to life in the rewriting."
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"I work most days and if you work most days and you get at least a page done a day, then at the end of the year you have 365. So the pages accumulate and then I publish the books."
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"For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence."
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"We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen - there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark."
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"--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others"
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"The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic."
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"Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts."
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"I think you're a wonder. You're beautiful. You're mature. You are, I admit, vastly more experienced than I am. That's what threw me. I was thrown. Forgive me."
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"The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction."
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"When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it."
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"Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed."
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"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."
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"I don't wish to be a slave any longer to the stringent exigencies of literature."
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"There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed."
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"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"
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