Everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say; and everything you do does either more than you wanted it to do or less than you wanted it to do. What you said and did made a difference, all right, but not the difference you intended.

— Philip Roth

Philip Roth Quotes

One’s story isn’t a skin to be shed – it’s inescapable, one’s body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that’s at once your invention and the invention of you.

— Philip Roth

I know the kind of man I am and the kind of writer. I have my own kind of bravery, and please, let’s leave it at that.

— Philip Roth

It was the first time I saw my father cry. A childhood milestone, when another’s tears are more unbearable than one’s own.

— Philip Roth

I’ll be curious to see how we all come out someday. It could be an interesting story. You’re not so nice and polite in your fiction,” he said. “You’re a different person.

— Philip Roth

Ma appena desideri appassionatamente una cosa sulla quale non puoi esercitare alcun controllo, sei alla vigilia di una grossa delusione: ti stai preparando a farti mettere in ginocchio.

— Philip Roth

Pain is like a baby crying. What it wants it can’t name.

— Philip Roth

The burden isn’t that everything has to be a book. It’s that everything can be a book. And doesn’t count as life until it is.

— Philip Roth

Could he continue to maintain his sanity that long? He didn’t know. That’s why he was devouring two or three books a day – to remove himself every minute that he possibly could from the madness of this life.

— Philip Roth

Maybe, despite ideology, politics, and history, a genuine catastrophe is always personal bathos at the core. Life can’t be impugned for any failure to trivialize people. You have to take your hat off to life for the techniques at its disposal to strip a man of his significance and empty him totally of his pride.

— Philip Roth

La vejez no es una batalla; la vejez es una masacre.

— Philip Roth

Anger is to make you effective. That’s its survival function. That’s why it’s given to you. If it makes you ineffective, drop it like a hot potato.

— Philip Roth

He has outlived dissatisfaction. This is what remains after the passing of everything, the disciplined sadness of stoicism. This is the cooling. For so long it’s so hot, everything in life is so intense, and then little by little it goes away, and then comes the cooling, and then comes the ashes.

— Philip Roth

To be alive, to him, is to be made of memory – to him if a man’s not made of memory, he’s made of nothing.

— Philip Roth

That box from which you cannot force your way out. That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever.

— Philip Roth

The accident of a wrong turn had brought me there, and all I did by getting out of the car and entering the cemetery to find her grave was to bow to its impelling force. My mother and the other dead had been brought here by the impelling force of what was, after all, a more unlikely accident–having once lived.

— Philip Roth

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends; it is with them that I take those walks in the country at the end of the day. I am also on friendly terms with Deadly Playfulness, Playful Playfulness, Serious Playfulness, Serious Seriousness, and Sheer Sheerness. From the last, however, I get nothing; he just wrings my heart and leaves me speechless.

— Philip Roth

Inhibition doesn’t grow on trees, you know – takes patience, takes concentration, takes a dedicated and self-sacrificing parent and a hard-working attentive little child to create in only a few years’ time a really constrained and tight-ass human being.

— Philip Roth

I don’t necessarily admire whom and what you choose to read and the gullibility with which you take at face value rationalist blasphemies spouted by an immoralist of the ilk of Bertrand Russell, four times married, a blatant adulterer, an advocate of free love, a self-confessed socialist dismissed from his university position for his antiwar campaigning during the First War and imprisoned for that by the British authorities.

— Philip Roth

You have a fighting spirit. I admire that, or would admire it should you choose to harness it to a worthier cause than that of someone considered a criminal subversive by his own national government.

— Philip Roth

How could the sidewalk’s impassable leaf-strewn lagoons and the grassy little yards oozing from the flood of the downspouts exude a smell that roused my delight as if I’d been born in a tropical rain forest? Tinged with the bright after-storm light, Summit Avenue was as agleam with life as a pet, my own silky, pulsating pet, washed clean by sheets of falling water and now stretched its full length to bask in the bliss.

— Philip Roth
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