Philip Roth: Trending quotes (page 2)

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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