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Philip Roth citations
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Philip Roth, né le 19 mars 1933 à Newark dans le New Jersey, est un écrivain américain. Il vit aujourd’hui dans le Connecticut.

✵ 19. mars 1933 – 22. mai 2018   •   Autres noms فیلیپ راث
Philip Roth photo
Philip Roth: 102   citations 0   J'aime

Philip Roth citations célèbres

“Il m'arrivait aussi, à l'occasion, d'être accosté dans les rues de New York par des inconnus qui se lançaient dans une rencontre orageuse avec moi à cause de quelque chose dans mes romans qui les séduisait ou qui les exaspérait, ou qui les séduisait parce que cela les exaspérait, ou qui les exaspérait parce que cela les séduisait.”

Philip Roth livre Exit le fantôme

Exit Ghost

“Il s'avança un fauteuil, s'installa entre sa femme et sa mère et, tandis que Dawn parlait, il lui prit la main. Il y a cent façons de prendre la main de quelqu'un. Selon que c'est la main d'un enfant, la main d'un ami, la main d'un parent agé, la main de celui qui part, la main du mourant, la main du mort. Il tenait la main de Dawn comme on tient la main d'une femme adorée, toute sa ferveur passant dans son étreinte, comme si, par cette pression de sa paume, il arrivait à échanger leurs âmes, comme si ces doigts enlacés symbolisaient toute leur intimité. Il tenait la main de Dawn comme s'il ne savait rien de leur situation présente.”

Philip Roth livre Pastorale américaine

American Pastoral

“Je suis pessimiste sur l'avenir de la lecture. Je ne peux pas parler pour d'autres pays que le mien, mais aux États-Unis, la lecture sérieuse, concentrée, intelligente, est une activité qui ne cesse de reculer. Face à l'écran et à son pouvoir hypnotique, la lecture de romans est un art désormais mourant. La forme romanesque, comme vecteur d'informations sur le monde et l'expérience humaine, et comme plaisir, est devenue obsolète.”

Philip Roth

“La fente, comme tracée au tire-ligne, cette superbe couture rabattue, qui s'épanouira un jour en pétales et, au fil du temps, deviendra le con de la femme, un pliage d'origami.”

Philip Roth livre Pastorale américaine

American Pastoral

“A ses yeux, celui qui donnait des signes extérieurs de bonté était bon, celui qui donnait des signes extérieurs de loyauté était loyal. Celui qui donnait des signes extérieurs d'intelligence, intelligent. C'est ainsi qu'il n'avait jamais vu clair en sa fille, ni en sa femme, ni en sa seule et unique maîtresse – il était sans doute loin de voir clair en lui…”

Philip Roth livre Pastorale américaine

American Pastoral

“La poseuse de bombe présumée est décrite comme intelligente et douée mais d'un caractère têtu.”

Philip Roth livre Pastorale américaine

American Pastoral

“Chaque fois que je levais les yeux je voyais mon petit ami complètement gaga parce que j'étais une reine de beauté à la noix! T'étais un vrai gosse! Il a fallu que tu me transformes en princesse! Eh ben, regarde où ça m'a menée. A l'asile! Elle chez les dingues, ta princesse!”

Philip Roth livre Pastorale américaine

American Pastoral

Philip Roth: Citations en anglais

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

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Philip Roth livre Portnoy's Complaint

Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

“All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self…. What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself — a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required…. I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.”

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Philip Roth livre The Counterlife

Source: The Counterlife (1986), Ch. 5

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

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Philip Roth livre Goodbye, Columbus

Source: Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Chapter 2

“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.”

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Philip Roth livre The Counterlife

Source: The Counterlife (1986), Ch. 5

“Beginning a book is unpleasant. I’m entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that’s finally everything. I type out beginnings and they’re awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it—that’s what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive. Okay, I say to myself, that’s your beginning, start there; that’s the first paragraph of the book. I’ll go over the first six months of work and underline in red a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes no more than a phrase, that has some life in it, and then I’ll type all these out on one page. Usually it doesn’t come to more than one page, but if I’m lucky, that’s the start of page one. I look for the liveliness to set the tone. After the awful beginning come the months of freewheeling play, and after the play come the crises, turning against your material and hating the book.”

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Philip Roth

Paris Review Interview (1986)

“Oh Patimkin! Fruit grew in their refrigerator and sporting goods dropped from their trees!”

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Philip Roth livre Goodbye, Columbus

Goodbye, Columbus (1959)

“A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die.”

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Philip Roth livre Portnoy's Complaint

Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

“Circumcision is startling, all right, particularly when performed by a garlicked old man upon the glory of a newborn body, but then maybe that’s what the Jews had in mind and what makes the act seem quintessentially Jewish and the mark of their reality. Circumcision makes it clear as can be that you are here and not there, that you are out and not in — also that you’re mine and not theirs…. Quite convincingly, circumcision gives the lie to the womb-dream of life in the beautiful state of innocent prehistory, the appealing idyll of living "naturally," unencumbered by man-made ritual. To be born is to lose all that. The heavy hand of human values falls upon you right at the start, marking your genitals as its own.”

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Philip Roth livre The Counterlife

Source: The Counterlife (1986), Ch. 5

“Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.”

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Philip Roth livre The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

Opening letter to Nathan Zuckerman.
Referring to the life of a fiction writer
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

“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.”

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Philip Roth livre The Dying Animal

The Dying Animal (2001)

“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.”

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Philip Roth livre Portnoy's Complaint

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

“It isn’t that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history’s meaning.”

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Philip Roth livre The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

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

“Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body.”

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Philip Roth livre Everyman

Everyman (2006)

“Now, I'm very vulnerable to female beauty, as you know. Everybody's defenseless against something, and that's it for me. I see it and it blinds me to everything else. They come to my first class, and I know almost immediately which is the girl for me. There is a Mark Twain story in which he runs from a bull, and the bull looks up to him when he's hiding in a tree, and the bull thinks, "You are my meat, sir."”

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Philip Roth livre The Dying Animal

Well, that "sir" is transformed into "young lady" when I see them in class.
The Dying Animal (2001)

“""You'll always be powerless to this girl. You'll never be in charge. There's something there," George told me, "that makes you crazy and always will. If you don't cut the connection for good, in the end that something will destroy you. You're no longer merely answering natural need with her. This is the pathology in its purest form. Look," he told me, "see it as a critic, see it from a professional point of view. You violated the law of aesthetic distance. You sentimentalized the aesthetic experience with this girl - you personalized it, you sentimentalized it, and you lost the sense of separation essential to your enjoyment. Do you know when that happened? … I'm not against it because it's digusting. I'm against it because it's falling in love. 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."”

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Philip Roth livre The Dying Animal

The Dying Animal (2001)

“This indictment is a kind of fever that flares up from time to time. It flared up after "Defender of the Faith," again after "Goodbye Columbus," and understandably it went way up — to about 107 — after "Portnoy's Complaint." Now there's just a low-grade fever running, nothing to worry about.”

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Philip Roth

On criticism of his writing, as quoted in "The Unbounded Spirit of Philip Roth" http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/11/specials/roth-unbounded.html?_r=1&oref=slogin, interview with Mervyn Rothstein, The New York Times (1 August 1985), Late City Final Edition, section C, page 13, column 1

“When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters. This isn't to say I wished to change places. I didn't envy their persecution and the way in which it heightens their social importance. I didn't even envy them their seemingly more valuable and serious themes. The trivialization, in the West, of much that's deadly serious in the East is itself a subject, one requiring considerable imaginative ingenuity to transform into compelling fiction.”

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Philip Roth

Paris Review Interview (1986)

“The jealously. That poison. And unprovoked. Jealous even when she tells me she's going ice-skating with her eighteen-year-old brother.”

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Philip Roth livre The Dying Animal

Source: The Dying Animal (2001)

“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!”

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Philip Roth livre Portnoy's Complaint

Source: Portnoy's Complaint (1969), Ch. 4: "The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life"

“They boo you, they whistle, they stamp their feet—you hate it but you thrive on it. Because the things that wear you down are the things that nurture you and your talent.”

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Philip Roth livre The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

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

“I was trying to solve the problem of this book. (My Life as a Man) When it seemed I never would, I stopped and wrote Our Gang; when I tried again and still couldn't write it, I stopped and wrote the baseball book; then while finishing the baseball book, I stopped to write The Breast. It was as though I were blasting my way through a tunnel to reach the novel I couldn't write. Each of one's books is a blast, clearing the way for what's next.”

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Philip Roth

Paris Review Interview (1986)

“To become a celebrity is to become a brand name. There is Ivory Soap, Rice Krispies, and Philip Roth. Ivory is the soap that floats; Rice Krispies the breakfast cereal that goes snap-crackle-pop; Philip Roth the Jew who masturbates with a piece of liver.”

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Philip Roth

"The Ghosts of Roth," interview with Alan Finkielkraut, Esquire (September 1981)

“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.”

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Philip Roth livre Portnoy's Complaint

Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

“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.”

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Philip Roth

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

“Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed.”

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Philip Roth

Paris Review Interview (1986)

“In the eighties, a self-assured knucklehead whose unsurpassable hollowness and hackneyed sentiments and absolute blindness to every historical complexity became the object of national worship and, esteemed as a “great communicator” no less, won each of his two terms in a landslide.”

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Philip Roth livre Exit le fantôme

Exit Ghost (2007)

“I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they're actually trying to find out, "Is he as crazy as I am?"”

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Philip Roth

I don't need that question answered.
Paris Review Interview (1986)

“He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he’d feared from the start.”

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Philip Roth livre Everyman

Everyman (2006)

“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?"”

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Philip Roth livre Sabbath's Theater

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.
Sabbath's Theater (1995)

“The chances are that there will always be some people who will despise Jews, just so long as they continue to call themselves Jews; and, of course, we must keep an eye on them. But if some Jews are dreaming of a time when they will be accepted by Christians as Christians accept one another — if this is why certain Jewish writers should be silent — it may be that they are dreaming of a time that cannot be, and of a condition that does not exist, this side of one’s dreams. Perhaps even the Christians don’t accept one another as they are imagined to in that world from which Jews may believe themselves excluded solely because they are Jews.”

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Philip Roth

Writing About Jews (1963)

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