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
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
“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
“...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
“She had been stopped when Morty was killed, stopped from going forward, and all the logic went out of her life. She… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“Where everything is words, you'd think I'd have some mastery and know my way around, but all this churning hatred, each man… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“Now obviously, in peacetime a one-legged catcher, like a one-armed outfielder (such as the Mundys had roaming right), would have been at… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“...we go through life with a generalized sense that everybody is wrong except us. And since we don't just forget things because… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“Memories particularly of when they weren’t being what parents are nine-tenths of the time, the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure… — 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
“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach-that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“Alvin didn't cry, didn't curse, didn't holler… He was too far gone to roar on that day or even to crack. Only… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a… — 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
“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
