He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense. — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence. — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“If you don’t know the fantasy life of a country, it’s hard to write fiction about it.” — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“My God, he thought, the man I once was! The life that surrounded me! The force that was mine! No "otherness" to… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
You be greater than your feelings. I don't demand this of you - life does. Otherwise you'll be washed away by feelings.… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“This ordinarily even-tempered man struck furiously at his heart like some fanatic at prayer, and, assailed by remorse not just for this… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“Here is someone not set up for life's working out poorly, let alone for the impossible.But who is set up for the… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
Never in his life had occasion to ask himself, "Why are things the way they are?" Why should he bother, when the… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“Stunned by how little he'd gotten over her and she'd gotten over him, he walked away understanding, as outside his reading in… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“But, no, Nathan was utterly unable to involve himself in anything not entirely of his own making. The closest Nathan could ever… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“The disruption of the anticipated American future that was simply to have unrolled out of the solid American past, out of each… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living,… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“Under the sad end-of-days spell of the smoky dusk and the waning year, of the moon and its ostentatious superiority to the… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“...I finally went back to my seat in the second row and sat there doing what I've done throughout my professional life:… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“You think you know what a man is? You have no idea what a man is. You think you know what a… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“I felt as though the skin had been peeled away from half of my body. Half my face had been peeled away,… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“Making you believe what he wanted you to believe was his very reason for being. Maybe his only reason. I was intrigued… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn't stop, when the speculation and the theorizing and… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“It’s as though not even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance.… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“Oh Mickey, it was wonderful, it was fun - the whole kitten and kaboozle. It was like living. And to be denied… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“The kid, whose existence became a hallucination at seven, and a catastrophe at fourteen, and a disaster after that, whose vocation is… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life. — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“(...) he walked away understanding, (...) how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“The old intergenerational give-and-take of the country-that-used-to-be, when everyone knew his role and took the rules dead seriously, the acculturating back-and-forth that all of… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
You be greater than your feelings. I don't demand this of you - life does. Otherwise you'll be washed away by feelings. You'll be… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
The only way to have a funeral is to invite everyone who ever knew the person and just wait for the accident to happen-somebody… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
To become a celebrity is to become a brand name. There is Ivory Soap, Rice Krispies, and Philip Roth. Ivory is the soap that… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“There are no reasons. She is obliged to be as she is. We all are. Reasons are in books.” — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“As far as I can see there is no conquering or exorcising the past with words - words born either of imagination or forthrightness.” — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“What is astonishing is that we, who had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happened.” — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“Good Christ, a Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!” — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off – the sticky evidence is everywhere! — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“Better for real things to be uncontrollable, better for one's life to be undecipherable and intellectually impenetrable than to attempt to make casual sense… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
