Philip Roth Quotes

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

Only in America, Rabbi Golden, do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedalpushers and mink stoles - and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn't their fault they were given a gift like speech - look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic.

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.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.

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

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

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.

The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.

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

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 it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

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.

When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.

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.

World War III will be triggered off not by suppressed nationalists seeking political independence, as happened the first time around when the Serbs at Sarajevo shot the heir to the Austrian throne, but by some semiliterate, whacked-out "loner" who lobs a rocket into a nuclear arsenal in order to impress Brooke Shields.

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.

It's best to give while your hand is still warm.

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.

All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

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.

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

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

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.

When I was a child... I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.

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

Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art.

There are no uncontaminated angels

American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property--on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.

Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.

The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.

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.

People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.

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

Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown.

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.

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

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

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

There's something every woman wants, and that's a man to blame.

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!

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

You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!

There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.

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

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.

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets — no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

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