Philip Roth quotes - page 4

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. (Philip Roth)
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. View quote
Philip Roth
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. View quote
Philip Roth
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. View quote
Philip Roth
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. View quote
Philip Roth
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. View quote
Philip Roth
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. View quote
Philip Roth
nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others. View quote
Philip Roth
Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life. View quote
Philip Roth
Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. View quote
Philip Roth
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)
People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun. View quote
Philip Roth
The truth about us is endless. As are the lies. View quote
Philip Roth
We whipped our strangeness and newness into a froth that resembled love, and we dared not play too long with it, talk too much of it, or it would flatten and fizzle away. View quote
Philip Roth
No one I know of has foreseen an America like the one we live in today. View quote
Philip Roth
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. View quote
Philip Roth
You be greater than your feelings. I don't demand this of you - life does. Otherwise you'll be washed away by feelings. You'll be washed out to sea and never seen again. View quote
Philip Roth
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." View quote
Philip Roth
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?" View quote
Philip Roth
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. View quote
Philip Roth
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)
A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons. View quote
Philip Roth
Should you protect profits? Yes. But run for the hills? No. View quote
Philip Roth
Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war. View quote
Philip Roth
I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter, that means you had a hard time during the Bush years. View quote
Philip Roth