Philip Roth Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.

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

I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.

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

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.

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

The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop.

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.

All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

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.

It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces.

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

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

When I was a child... I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'

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.

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

There are no uncontaminated angels

Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art.

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.

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

Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.

People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.

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

Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown.

Being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

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

Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

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!

There's something every woman wants, and that's a man to blame.

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

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

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!

Too late, but I understand. That we don't perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that -- of just that.

A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.

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.

I know I'm not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation.

It's amazing how much punishment we can take.

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.

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

Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline.

This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.

Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind.

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.

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