Philip Roth Quotes

128 quotes in 1742 categories

• Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?
• The signore...wishes her to begin at the beginning.
• I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart,…
• Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
• The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
• Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.
• I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn…
• I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.
• Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the…
• What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak.…
• A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a…
• A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!
• It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind…
• Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And…
• It's absolutely fantastic. When I was a kid, my father was always trying to tell me how to be a man, and he said to…
• Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to…
• Should you protect profits? Yes. But run for the hills? No.
• Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.
• Let's hope the first comes first.
• Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced…

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