Philip Roth

“Terrifying encounters with the end? I'm thirty-four! Worry about oblivion, he told himself, when you're seventy-five! The remote future will be time…

— Philip Roth

“everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say; and everything…

— Philip Roth

“But by the third year he had come to wonder whether Laura's purpose wasn't the shield behind which he was still hiding…

— Philip Roth

Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged -- where they will…

— Philip Roth

--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others

— Philip Roth

The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as…

— Philip Roth

“It’s a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching…

— Philip Roth

“...they'll say, 'He never recovered from that breakdown and this was the result. It had to be the breakdown--not even he was…

— Philip Roth

“There was no other explanation for such an illness in a man otherwise so young and fit. It was the consequence of…

— Philip Roth

He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist’s success depends as…

— Philip Roth

“What is so often laughable, in the stories of Kundera's Czechoslovakia, is how grimly serious just about everything turns out to be,…

— Philip Roth

“No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and…

— Philip Roth

“Ingeniously as their parents and teachers may attempt to protect the young from being drawn, to their detriment, into the moronic amusement…

— Philip Roth

“To those not yet old, being old means you’ve been. But being old also means that despite, in addition to, and in…

— Philip Roth

“Though I'd never forgotten Alan, I hadn't uttered his name aloud in the many years since he'd died, back in that decade…

— Philip Roth

“No importa cuánto sepas, no importa cuánto pienses, no importa cuánto maquines, finjas y planees, no estás por encima del sexo. Es…

— Philip Roth

“I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it…

— Philip Roth

“Conflicting stories continue to circulate concerning the death of the President. A second White House announcement has now called attention to the…

— Philip Roth

“You asked if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there's been some…

— Philip Roth

“It was not for me, after these last seventy-two hours, to reject as too outlandish the possibility that the situation for him…

— Philip Roth

“Things don't have to reach a peak. They can just go on. You do want to make a narrative out of it,…

— Philip Roth

“They were just bones, bones in a box, but their bones were his bones, and he stood as close to the bones…

— Philip Roth

“In May of 1945, only a few weeks after the fighting had ended in Europe, I was rotated back to the States,…

— Philip Roth

“Yes, alone we are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper. There is nothing we…

— Philip Roth

“Who are the new people when you do meet them? They're the same old people in masks. There's nothing new about them…

— Philip Roth

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

— Philip Roth

“That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people…

— Philip Roth

When I was a child... I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'

— Philip Roth

“No, I won't do it. I will not be locked into your head in this way. I will not participate in this…

— Philip Roth

“Gone were the days when Zuckerman had only to worry about Zuckerman making money: henceforth he would have to worry about his…

— Philip Roth

“But it is INTERESTING trying to get a handle on one's own subjectivity--something to think about, to play around with, and what's…

— Philip Roth

Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets,…

— Philip Roth

“But to wish oneself into another's glory, as boy or as man, is an impossibility, untenable on psychological grounds if you are…

— Philip Roth

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

— Philip Roth

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,…

— Philip Roth

He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.

— Philip Roth

“If he were around this place as a professor, he could teach 'Appropriate Behavior in Classical Greek Drama,' a course that would…

— Philip Roth

How can one say, 'No, this isn't a part of life,' since it always is? The contaminant of sex, the redeeming corruption…

— Philip Roth

“It was puzzling to own trees - they were not owned the way a business os owned or even a house is…

— Philip Roth

“Also, she had been secretary to the soccer coach, an office pretty much without laurels in our own time, but apparently the…

— Philip Roth