Philip Roth: Likeness

Philip Roth was American novelist. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.
Philip Roth: 190   quotes 7   likes

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

Philip Roth book The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

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

Age

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

Philip Roth

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
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.

“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.”

Philip Roth book Portnoy's Complaint

Source: Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

Fear , Travel

“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)

Hate , Health , Age , Fear

“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)

Lying

“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

Intelligence

“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)

Life , Thinking

“…her breasts swam towards me like two pink-nosed fish and she let me hold them.”

Philip Roth book Goodbye, Columbus

Source: Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Chapter 2

Fish

“England’s made a Jew of me in only eight weeks, which, on reflection, might be the least painful method. A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.”

Philip Roth book The Counterlife

Source: The Counterlife (1986), Ch. 5

Pain , Home

“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.”

Philip Roth book Portnoy's Complaint

Part 5: "Cunt Crazy"
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

Age , Sun

“I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.”

Philip Roth

As quoted in "Roth on Trump" by Judith Thurman, in The New Yorker (30 January 2017), p. 17

Art , History , Science

“I do not write a story to make evident whatever disapproval I may feel for adulterous men. I write a story of a man who is adulterous to reveal the condition of such a man. If the adulterous man is a Jew, then I am revealing the condition of an adulterous man who is a Jew. Why tell that story? Because I seem to be interested in how — and why and when — a man acts counter to what he considers to be his "best self," or what others assume it to be, or would like for it to be. The subject is hardly "mine"; it interested readers and writers for a long time before it became my turn to be engaged by it, too.”

Philip Roth

Writing About Jews (1963)

Time , Self-confidence , Making love , Feeling

“You know, the dirty little secret is no longer sex; the dirty little secret is hatred and rage. It's the tirade that's taboo. Odd that this should be so a hundred years after Dostoyevsky (and fifty after Freud), but nobody nice likes to be identified with the stuff. It's the way folks used to feel about fellatio in the good old days. "Me? Never heard of it. Disgusting."”

Philip Roth

But is it "hostile," really, to take a look at the ferocity of the emotion they call "hostility"?
Paris Review Interview (1986)

Sex , Secret , Rage , Way