Top 250 Philip Roth Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”

— Philip Roth

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

2. “I did the best I could with what I had.”

— Philip Roth

3. “Don’t judge it. Just write it. Don’t judge it. It’s not for you to judge it.”

— Philip Roth

4. “Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown.”

— Philip Roth

5. “You can’t write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.”

— Philip Roth

6. “Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.”

— Philip Roth

7. “Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.”

— Philip Roth

8. “All that we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.”

— Philip Roth

9. “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 washed out to sea and never seen again.”

— Philip Roth

10. “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...”

— Philip Roth

11. “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.”

— Philip Roth

12. “The pleasure isn’t in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.”

— Philip Roth

13. “The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.”

— Philip Roth

14. “He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach – that it makes no sense.”

— Philip Roth

15. “Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art.”

— Philip Roth

16. “I think you’re a wonder. You’re beautiful. You’re mature. You are, I admit, vastly more experienced than I am. That’s what threw me. I was thrown. Forgive me.”

— Philip Roth

Featured in: Breakup Quotes

17. “Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.”

— Philip Roth

18. “Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.”

— Philip Roth

19. “Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out? Does anyone find anyone that enchanting unless they have sexual business with them? Who else are you enchanted by? Nobody.”

— Philip Roth

20. “You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.”

— Philip Roth

21. “And as he spoke, I was thinking, ’the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.”

— Philip Roth

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

22. “It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces.”

— Philip Roth

23. “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.”

— Philip Roth

24. “How Far back must we go to discover the beginning of trouble?”

— Philip Roth

25. “Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder- and nothing more.”

— Philip Roth

26. “The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.”

— Philip Roth

27. “There’s something every woman wants, and that’s a man to blame.”

— Philip Roth

28. “He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach – that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial and, even then, bought at the price of an obstinate estrangement from oneself and one’s history.”

— Philip Roth

29. “There’s a plot afoot all right, and I’ll gladly name the forces propelling it – hysteria, ignorance, malice, stupidity, hatred, and fear.”

— Philip Roth

30. “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.”

— Philip Roth

Featured in: Fun Quotes

31. “The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.”

— Philip Roth

32. “I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off – the sticky evidence is everywhere!”

— Philip Roth

33. “Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged – where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.”

— Philip Roth

34. “Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid.”

— Philip Roth

35. “You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn’t annihilate human nature.”

— Philip Roth

36. “How easy life is when it’s easy, and how hard when it’s hard.”

— Philip Roth

37. “Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it.”

— Philip Roth

38. “In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees.”

— Philip Roth

39. “Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.”

— Philip Roth

40. “Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that – well, lucky you.”

— Philip Roth

41. “To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don’t read the novel really.”

— Philip Roth

Featured in: Reading Quotes

42. “Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.”

— Philip Roth

43. “Everyone becomes a part of history whether they like it or not and whether they know it or not.”

— Philip Roth

44. “Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.”

— Philip Roth

45. “Writing turns you into somebody who’s always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn’t completely wreck your life.”

— Philip Roth

46. “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 gradually decline.”

— Philip Roth

47. “Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn’t restrain myself and spoke my mind.”

— Philip Roth

48. “The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral – into the indigenous American berserk.”

— Philip Roth

49. “I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.”

— Philip Roth

50. “It’s the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge.”

— Philip Roth