Top 250 Philip Roth Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “There were many hours when I never quite know how I’d gotten there or why I stayed.”

— Philip Roth

52. “I work most days and if you work most days and you get at least a page done a day, then at the end of the year you have 365. So the pages accumulate and then I publish the books.”

— Philip Roth

53. “A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.”

— Philip Roth

54. “The book really comes to life in the rewriting.”

— Philip Roth

55. “Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?”

— Philip Roth

56. “There are no uncontaminated angels.”

— Philip Roth

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

— Philip Roth

58. “At a certain stage of misery, you’ll try anything to explain what’s going on with you, even if you know it doesn’t explain a thing and it’s one failed explanation after another.”

— Philip Roth

59. “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.”

— Philip Roth

60. “Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them – at least I didn’t; to phrase them was to invent them and own them.”

— Philip Roth

61. “Too late, but I understand. That we don’t perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that – of just that.”

— Philip Roth

62. “You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.”

— Philip Roth

63. “It’s best to give while your hand is still warm.”

— Philip Roth

64. “When he is sick, every man wants his mother.”

— Philip Roth

65. “You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.”

— Philip Roth

66. “In America everything goes and nothing matters, while in Europe nothing goes and everything matters.”

— Philip Roth

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

— Philip Roth

68. “Don’t be against yourself. There’s enough cruelty in the world as it is. Don’t make things worse by scapegoating yourself.”

— Philip Roth

69. “I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface.”

— Philip Roth

70. “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!”

— Philip Roth

71. “Yes, alone we are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper. There is nothing we can do to dispose of that. No, loneliness shouldn’t surprise us, as astonishing to experience as it may be. You can try turning yourself inside out, but all you are then is inside out and lonely instead of inside in and lonely.”

— Philip Roth

72. “It was the first time I saw my father cry. A childhood milestone, when another’s tears are more unbearable than one’s own.”

— Philip Roth

73. “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.”

— Philip Roth

74. “I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.”

— Philip Roth

75. “You want monogamy outside marriage and adultery inside marriage.”

— Philip Roth

76. “As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn’t touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing.”

— Philip Roth

77. “For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can’t beat the nasty side of existence.”

— Philip Roth

78. “Being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.”

— Philip Roth

79. “The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can’t stop.”

— Philip Roth

80. “When the whole world doesn’t believe in God, it’ll be a great place.”

— Philip Roth

81. “Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.”

— Philip Roth

82. “A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!”

— Philip Roth

83. “We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow’s newspaper.”

— Philip Roth

84. “Each book starts from ashes really. I don’t feel that I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell or that story to tell, but I want to be occupied with the writing process while I’m living.”

— Philip Roth

85. “Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist’s desire to prove that he’s good. The terrible temptation of idealism!”

— Philip Roth

86. “Politics is the great generalizer and literature the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other – they are in an antagonistic relationship.”

— Philip Roth

87. “How can one say, ‘No, this isn’t a part of life,’ since it always is? The contaminant of sex, the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are.”

— Philip Roth

88. “I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.”

— Philip Roth

89. “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, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.”

— Philip Roth

90. “A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.”

— Philip Roth

91. “I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive.”

— Philip Roth

92. “Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.”

— Philip Roth

93. “I know I’m not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration – it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation.”

— Philip Roth

94. “People are unjust to anger – it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.”

— Philip Roth

95. “The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions...”

— Philip Roth

96. “I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.”

— Philip Roth

97. “Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.”

— Philip Roth

98. “You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare.”

— Philip Roth

99. “I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.”

— Philip Roth

100. “Others? He dares to call us others? He’s the other. The one who looks most American – and he’s the one who is least American! The man is unfit. He shouldn’t be there. He shouldn’t be there, and it’s as simple as that!”

— Philip Roth