Philip Roth: Trending quotes

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Philip Roth: 190 quotes7 likes

“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

“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 book Portnoy's Complaint

Source: Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

“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 Portnoy's Complaint

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?

“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.”

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?.”

Philip Roth book Everyman

Everyman (2006)

“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 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.”

Philip Roth

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

“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 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.”

Philip Roth book The Dying Animal

The Dying Animal (2001)

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

Philip Roth

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

“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.”

Philip Roth book Everyman

Everyman (2006)

“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 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.”

Philip Roth

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)

“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.”

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.”

Philip Roth book The Dying Animal

The Dying Animal (2001)

“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.”

Philip Roth book Sabbath's Theater

Sabbath's Theater (1995)