“As far as I can see there is no conquering or exorcising the past with words - words born either of imagination… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“But the danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for.… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
'Haunted by the past' is a commonplace phrase because it's a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, 'haunted', the… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“time having transformed his own body into a storehouse for man-made contraptions designed to fend off collapse... there was only our bodies,… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
Eventually the writing takes time. What I want to do is get the story down and I want to know what happens… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“This is the plot up to the moment when the writer leaves the woman still dolefully enmeshed in it, and, suitcase in… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“Why does someone, in the midst of your worst suffering, decide the time has come to drive home, disguised in the form… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“I know I’m not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
People were standing up everywhere shouting, "This is me! This is me!" Every time you looked at them they stood up and… — 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
I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter that means you had a hard time during the Bush years. — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“Play the moment, play whatever plays for you in that moment, and then go to the next moment. It doesn't matter where… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant! — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“They were just bones, bones in a box, but their bones were his bones, and he stood as close to the bones… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“Curiously, the darkness seemed to have something to do with Harriet, Ron's intended, and I thought for a time that it was… — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience.… — 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
“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 Copy Share Image
Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts. — Philip Roth Copy Share Image
“Everyone thinks at some time or other that in a hundred years no one now alive will be on earth - the… — 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
“You've got a good girl this time. Don't screw it up. Don't let her go.” — 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
