Quotes By Philip Roth

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

Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.

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

When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

Should you protect profits? Yes. But run for the hills? No.

With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two years your life stopped. If you had been running in the direction of your life, you had to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain boring.

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

History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.

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

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

Nothing keeps its promise.

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.

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