Philip Roth Quotes

“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…”

Source: The Dying Animal

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

Source: Ghost Writer

“… and then this amazing creature -to whom no one has ever said "Shah!" or "I only hope your children will do the same to you someday!"”

Source: American Pastoral

“The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.”

Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

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

The Human Stain (2000)
Context: 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.

“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.”

Source: Everyman (2006)

Philip Roth Quotes about life

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

Source: The Dying Animal

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

Source: American Pastoral

“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.”

Source: The Professor Of Desire

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

Philip Roth book The Ghost Writer

Source: The Ghost Writer

“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!”

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

Source: Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

Philip Roth: Trending quotes

Philip Roth book The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

Opening letter to Nathan Zuckerman
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

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

“We whipped our strangeness and newness into a froth that resembled love, and we dared not play too long with it, talk too much of it, or it would flatten and fizzle away”

Paris Review Interview (1986)
Context: You ask if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there's been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it's a way of life for them. It doesn't mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book — if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don't. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that's otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn't fiction.

Philip Roth book Goodbye, Columbus

Source: Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Chapter 2
Context: We came back to the chairs now and then and sang hesitant, clever, nervous, gentle dithyrambs about how we were beginning to feel towards one another. 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. We whipped our strangeness and newness into a froth that resembled love, and we dared not play too long with it, talk too much of it, or it would flatten and fizzle away. So we moved back and forth from chairs to water, from talk to silence, and considering my unshakable edginess with Brenda, and the high walls of ego that rose, buttresses and all, between her and her knowledge of herself, we managed pretty well.

Philip Roth Quotes

“No one I know of has foreseen an America like the one we live in today.”

“Charles Lindbergh, in life as in my novel, may have been a genuine racist and an anti-Semite and a white supremacist sympathetic to Fascism, but he was also — because of the extraordinary feat of his solo trans-Atlantic flight at the age of 25 — an authentic American hero 13 years before I have him winning the presidency. … Trump, by comparison, is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.”

Comparing Charles Lindbergh's leadership of an "America First" movement with that of Donald Trump, in responses to being asked about foreseeing an America such as now exists in his earlier writings, including his alternate-history novel The Plot Against America (2004) where Lindbergh defeated FDR for the presidency in 1940, as quoted in "No Longer Writing, Philip Roth Still Has Plenty to Say" by Charles Mcgrath, in The New York Times (16 January 2018) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/books/review/philip-roth-interview.html <br class="br">Context: No one I know of has foreseen an America like the one we live in today. No one (except perhaps the acidic H. L. Mencken, who famously described American democracy as “the worship of jackals by jackasses”) could have imagined that the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the U. S. A., the most debasing of disasters, would appear not, say, in the terrifying guise of an Orwellian Big Brother but in the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon. How naïve I was in 1960 to think that I was an American living in preposterous times! How quaint! But then what could I know in 1960 of 1963 or 1968 or 1974 or 2001 or 2016? … However prescient The Plot Against America might seem to you, there is surely one enormous difference between the political circumstances I invent there for the U. S. in 1940 and the political calamity that dismays us so today. It’s the difference in stature between a President Lindbergh and a President Trump. Charles Lindbergh, in life as in my novel, may have been a genuine racist and an anti-Semite and a white supremacist sympathetic to Fascism, but he was also — because of the extraordinary feat of his solo trans-Atlantic flight at the age of 25 — an authentic American hero 13 years before I have him winning the presidency. … Trump, by comparison, is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.

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

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

Source: American Pastoral

“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.”

Source: The Human Stain

“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.”

Source: The Human Stain

“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.”

“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.”

Source: Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories

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

“nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others”

Philip Roth book The Plot Against America

Source: The Plot Against America

“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 book Indignation

Source: Indignation

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

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

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

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

Source: Everyman

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

Source: Portnoy's Complaint

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

Source: The Human Stain

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

“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.”

“There are no uncontaminated angels”

Source: Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

“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.”

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

Source: Everyman

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

As quoted in "Works in Progress" in The New York Times Book Review (15 July 1979), page BR1

“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.”

Source: Portnoy's Complaint

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

Source: American Pastoral

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

Source: American Pastoral

“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 book Nemesis

Source: Nemesis

“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?"”

“Turned the wrong way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied in "History", harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.”

Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
Variant: 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?

Philip Roth book The Plot Against America

Source: The Plot Against America (2004), Chapter 3, "June 1941 – December 1941: Following Christians", pp. 113–114 ISBN 0547345313.

“You rebel against the tribal and look for the individual, for your own voice as against the stereotypical voice of the tribe or the tribe's stereotype of itself. You have to establish yourself against your predecessor, and doing so can well involve what they like to call self-hatred. I happen to think that—all those protestations notwithstanding—your self hatred was real and a positive force in its very destructiveness. Since to build something new often requires that something else be destroyed, self-hatred is valuable for a young person. What should he or she have instead—self-approval, self-satisfaction, self-praise? It's not so bad to hate the norms that keep a society from moving on, especially when the norms are dictated by fear as much as by anything else and especially when that fear is of the enemy forces of the overwhelming majority. But you seem now to be so strongly motivated by a need for reconciliation with the tribe that you aren't even willing to acknowledge how disapproving of its platitudinous demands you were back then, however ineluctably Jewish you may also have felt. The prodigal son who once upset the tribal balance—and perhaps even invigorated the tribe's health—may well, in his old age, have a sentimental urge to go back home, but isn't this a bit premature in you, aren't you really too young to have it so fully developed?”

Philip Roth book The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

Nathan Zuckerman to Philip Roth
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

“Why must he mistrust his life just when he was more its master than he'd been in years?.”

“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.”

Everyman (2006)

Philip Roth book Deception

Deception: A Novel (1990)

“Each year she taught him the names of the flowers in her language and in his, and from one year to the next he could not even remember the English. For nearly thirty years Sabbath had been exiled in these mountains, and still he could name hardly anything. They didn't have this stuff where he came from. All these things growing were beside the point there. He was from the shore. There was sand and ocean, horizon and sky, daytime and nighttime - the light, the dark, the tide, the stars, the boats, the sun, the mists, the gulls. There were the jetties, the piers, the boardwalk, the booming, silent, limitless sea. Where he grew up they had the Atlantic. You could touch with your toes where America began. They lived in a stucco bungalow two short streets from the edge of America. The house. The porch. The screens. The icebox. The tub. The linoleum. The broom. The pantry. The ants. The sofa. The radio. The garage. The outside shower with the slatted wooden floor Morty had built and the drain that always clogged. In summer, the salty sea breeze and the dazling light; in September, the hurricanes; in January, the storms. They had January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, November, December. And then January. And then again January, no end to the stockpile of Januaries, of Mays, of Marches. August, December, April - name a month, and they had it in spades. They'd had endlessness. He had grown up on endlessness and his mother - in the beginning they were the same thing. His mother, his mother, his mother, his mother, his mother… and then there was his mother, his father, Grandma, Morty, and the Atlantic at the end of the street. The ocean, the beach, the first two streets in America, then the house, and in the house a mother who never stopped whistlîg until December 1944. If Morty had come alive, if the endlessness had ended naturally instead of with the telegram, if after the war Morty had started doing electrical work and plumbing for people, had become a builder at the shore, gone into the construction business just as the boom in Monmouth County was beginning…Didn't matter. Take your pick. Get betrayed by the fantasy of endlessness or by the fact of finitude. No, Sabbath could only have wound up Sabbath, begging for what he was begging, bound to what he was bound, saying what he did not wish to stop himself from saying.”

Philip Roth book Sabbath's Theater

Sabbath's Theater (1995)

“I'm exactly the opposite of religious, I'm anti-religious. I find religious people hideous. I hate the religious lies. It's all a big lie. … I have such a huge dislike. It's not a neurotic thing, but the miserable record of religion. I don't even want to talk about it, it's not interesting to talk about the sheep referred to as believers. When I write, I'm alone. It's filled with fear and loneliness and anxiety - and I never needed religion to save me.”

“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.”

Interview for Martin Krasnik of the Guardian, (14 December 2005) http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/dec/14/fiction.philiproth

Philip Roth book Deception

Deception: A Novel (1990)

“You too need the lecture on the childishness of coupling? Of course it's childish. Family life is, today more than ever, when the ethos is created substantially by the children. It's even worse when there are no children around. Because the childish adult replaces the child. Coupled life and family life bring out everything that's childish in everyone involved. Why do they have to sleep night after night in the same bed? Why must they be on the phone to each other five times a day? Why are they always with each other? The forced deference is certainly childish. The unnatural deference.”

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

The Dying Animal (2001)

“I'm sure the liars as skillful and persistent and devious as you reach the point where it's the one you are lying to, and not you, who seems like the one with the serious limitations.”

"A Visit with Philip Roth," interview with James Atlas, The New York Times Book Review (2 September 1979), p. BR1

“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.”

Everyman (2006)

Philip Roth book The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

Opening letter to Nathan Zuckerman
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

“They [the young] are not “no-longers,” losing faculties, losing control, shamefully dispossessed from themselves, marked by deprivation and experiencing the organic rebellion staged by the body against the elderly; they are “not-yets,” with no idea how quickly things turn out another way.”

Philip Roth book Exit Ghost

Exit Ghost (2007)

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

Philip Roth book The Counterlife

Source: The Counterlife (1986), Ch. 5

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

“Life was a throwing off for poor aunt Gladys, her greatest joys were taking out the garbage, emptying the pantry, and making threadbare bundles for what she still refers to as the poor Jews of Palestine.”

Interview on CBS, 03 October 2010 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNv_a1CbX30, Philip Roth on Fame, Sex, and God http://www.cbsnews.com/news/philip-roth-on-fame-sex-and-god/ (3 October 2010)

Philip Roth book Goodbye, Columbus

Goodbye, Columbus (1959)

“That body is still new to her, she's still trying it out, thinking it through, a bit like a kid walking the streets with a loaded gun and deciding whether he's packing it to protect himself or to begin a life of crime.”

“Immediate reality is outside that window; so big it is, so much of it, everything entangled in everything else… What large thought Sabbath was struggling to express? Is he asking, "Whatever did happen to my own true life?" Was it taking place elsewhere? But how then can looking out of this window be so gigantically real? Well, that is the difference between the true and the real. We don't get to live in the truth. That's why Nikki ran away. She was an idealist, an innocent, touching, talented illusionist who wanted to live in the truth. Well, if you found it, kid, you're the first. In my experience the direction of life is toward incoherence—precisely what you would never confront. Maybe that was the only coherent thing you could think to do: die to deny incoherence.”

The Dying Animal (2001)

Philip Roth book Sabbath's Theater

Sabbath's Theater (1995)

“I'm not trying to turn you into a bourgeois, Naomi. If the bed is too luxurious, we can do it on the floor.”