Quotes by
Philip Roth |
1933-2018 , American writer
His books were characterized by an acute ear for dialogue, a concern with Jewish middle-class life, and the painful entanglements of sexual and familial love. In his later years, his works were informed by a preoccupation with mortality and with the failure of the aging body and mindHe first gained attention with the novella Goodbye, Columbus (1959). Other successful books of his early period were the Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) and The Ghost Writer (1979) which introduced an aspiring writer named Zuckerman, who is Roth’s alter ego.
Two later novels, Zuckerman Unbound (1981) and The Anatomy Lesson (1983), trace his protagonist’s subsequent life and career and constitute the “Zuckerman trilogy”. For his work, American Pastoral (1997), Roth was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
Perhaps his mots famous work is The Plot Against America (2004, TV 2020).
| 38 quotes | 1,224 visits |
Quotations
| • | Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre. 6 |
| • | Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts. 4 |
| • | A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die! 4 |
| • | It’s a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, “Momma, do we believe in winter?” 4 |
| • | Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts. 3 |
| • | Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war. 3 |
| • | The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress. |
| • | You can’t write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent. |
| • | Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown. |
| • | All that we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. |
| • | I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again… |
| • | Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material. |
| • | He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach – that it makes no sense. |
| • | Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up. |
| • | 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, that’s all we’re given of life. A taste. There is no more. |
| • | Because that is when you love somebody – when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game. |
| • | It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces. |
| • | Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends. |
| • | You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn’t annihilate human nature. |
| • | In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees. |
| • | Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it. |
| • | There’s something every woman wants, and that’s a man to blame. |
| • | Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding? |
| • | When he is sick, every man wants his mother. |
| • | Dreams? If only they had been! But I don’t need dreams, Doctor, that’s why I hardly have them – because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight! |
| • | How easy life is when it’s easy, and how hard when it’s hard. |
| • | It’s amazing how much punishment we can take. |
| • | When you publish a book, it’s the world’s book. The world edits it. |
| • | When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it will be a great place. |
| • | When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters. |
| • | Writing is frustration – it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It’s just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time. |
| • | Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let’s pretend. |
| • | The novelist’s obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word. |
| • | Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise. |
| • | Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing. |
| • | Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive. |
| • | You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you. |
| • | Anything can happen to anyone, but it usually doesn't. Except when it does. |
