Top 250 Philip Roth Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “He’d tell us that in a democracy, keeping abreast of current events was a citizen’s most important duty and that you could never start too early to be informed about the news of the day.”

— Philip Roth

102. “A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!”

— Philip Roth

103. “This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.”

— Philip Roth

104. “His nose was his most distinctive feature: curved like a scimitar at the top but bent flat at the tip, and with the bone of the bridge cut like a diamond – in short, a nose out of a folktale, the sort of sizable, convoluted, intricately turned nose that, for many centuries, confronted though they have been by every imaginable hardship, the Jews have never stopped making.”

— Philip Roth

105. “There was always something about our family, and I don’t mean color – there was something about us that impeded you. You think like a prisoner. You do, Coleman Brutus. You’re white as snow and you think like a slave.”

— Philip Roth

106. “What I wanted was the tiniest thing in the world: to be like everyone else.”

— Philip Roth

107. “He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he’d feared from the start.”

— Philip Roth

108. “Tu pleci, in timp ce altii, nu prea multi, raman pe loc, continuand sa faca ceea ce au facut dintotdeauna, iar cand te intorci, te minunezi ca-i vezi tot acolo si pe moment te simti usurat fiindca exista cineva care-si petrece intreaga viata in acelasi locsor, neavand deloc chef sa plece.”

— Philip Roth

109. “I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you – it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.”

— Philip Roth

110. “It’s human to have a secret, but it’s just as human to reveal it sooner or later.”

— Philip Roth

111. “Let’s hope the first comes first.”

— Philip Roth

112. “It’s amazing how much punishment we can take.”

— Philip Roth

113. “When you publish a book, it’s the world’s book. The world edits it.”

— Philip Roth

114. “For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one’s orbit.”

— Philip Roth

115. “I do not say correct or savory. I do not say seemly or even natural. I say serious. Sensationally serious. Unspeakably serious. Solemnly, recklessly, blissfully serious.”

— Philip Roth

116. “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 up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history’s meaning.”

— Philip Roth

117. “There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It’s more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you’re in its grip, it’s as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else.”

— Philip Roth

118. “Should you protect profits? Yes. But run for the hills? No.”

— Philip Roth

119. “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 who comes in out of the blue and says the truth. Everything else is table manners.”

— Philip Roth

120. “Not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized – that was the dream of his life.”

— Philip Roth

121. “You have to enjoy power, have a certain ruthlessness, to accept the beauty and not mourn the fact that it overshadows everything else. As with any exaggerated trait that sets you apart and makes you exceptional – and enviable, and hateable – to accept your beauty, to accept its effect on others, to play with it, to make the best of it, you’re well advised to develop a sense of humor.”

— Philip Roth

122. “I don’t wish to be a slave any longer to the stringent exigencies of literature.”

— Philip Roth

123. “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. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel.”

— Philip Roth

124. “The music I play after dinner is not a relief from the silence but something like its substantiation: listening to music for an hour or two every evening doesn’t deprive me of the silence – the music is the silence coming true.”

— Philip Roth

125. “The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.”

— Philip Roth

126. “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

127. “But why did you go,” my mother asked him, “when it was bound to upset you like this?” “I went,” he told her, “because every day I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.”

— Philip Roth

128. “If anybody asks, ‘Can you do this job? Can you handle it?’ you tell ‘em ‘Absolutely.’ By the time they find out that you can’t, you’ll have already learned, and the job’ll be yours. And who knows, it might just turn out to be the opportunity of a lifetime.”

— Philip Roth

129. “Three generations. All of them growing. The working. The saving. The success. Three generations in raptures over America. Three generations of becoming one with a people. And now with the fourth it had all come to nothing. The total vandalization of their world.”

— Philip Roth

130. “Each book starts from ashes.”

— Philip Roth

131. “One’s story isn’t a skin to be shed – it’s inescapable, one’s body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that’s at once your invention and the invention of you.”

— Philip Roth

132. “Inhibition doesn’t grow on trees, you know – takes patience, takes concentration, takes a dedicated and self-sacrificing parent and a hard-working attentive little child to create in only a few years’ time a really constrained and tight-ass human being.”

— Philip Roth

133. “If only I could have nourished myself upon the depths of his vulgarity, instead of that too becoming a source of shame. Shame and shame and shame and shame – every place I turn something else to be ashamed of.”

— Philip Roth

134. “The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy – that is every man’s tragedy.”

— Philip Roth

135. “Never in my life had I so harshly judged any adult – not my parents, not even Alvin or Uncle Monty – nor had I understood till then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others. “Did you meet Mr. von Ribbentrop?” Now almost girlishly bashful, she replied, “I danced with Mr. von Ribbentrop.” “Where?”

— Philip Roth

136. “That’s what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do.”

— Philip Roth

137. “Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.”

— Philip Roth

138. “One either imposes one’s ideas or one is imposed on.”

— Philip Roth

139. “We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

— Philip Roth

140. “I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a picnic and that I was no picnic myself.”

— Philip Roth

141. “Fear unmans us. Fear degrades us. Fostering less fear – that’s your job and mine.”

— Philip Roth

142. “There’s no remaking reality... Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There’s no other way.”

— Philip Roth

143. “Our homeland was America. Then the Republicans nominated Lindbergh and everything changed.”

— Philip Roth

144. “Many farcical, illogical, incomprehensible transactions are subsumed by the mania of lust.”

— Philip Roth

145. “In school we chanted, along with our teacher, I am the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my soul, and meanwhile, within my own body, an anarchic insurrection had been launched by one of my privates- which I was helpless to put down!”

— Philip Roth

146. “Nessuno dei pezzi di musica seria che aveva ascoltato per tutta la vita adulta gli dava la stessa emozione che ora provava ascoltando il vecchio swing: -Quel po’ di stoicismo che ho dentro se ne va, e il desiderio di non morire, di non morire mai, si fa quasi insopportabile.”

— Philip Roth

147. “There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with!”

— Philip Roth

148. “Son, anything can happen to anyone,” my father told me, “but it usually doesn’t.”

— Philip Roth

149. “That people were manifold creatures didn’t come as a surprise to the Swede, even if it was a bit of a shock to realize it anew when someone let you down. What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for.”

— Philip Roth

150. “And how long will the American people stand for this treachery perpetrated by their elected president? How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds.”

— Philip Roth