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

Philip Roth Quotes

Which only goes to show what everyone learns sooner or later about loss: the absence of a presence can crush the strongest people.

— Philip Roth

The profusion of the stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die.

— Philip Roth

Everything runs away, beginning with who you are, and at some indefinable point you come to half understand that the ruthless antagonist is yourself.

— Philip Roth

Two hundred and sixty miles round-trip, but it was worth it for Drenka’s breasts.

— Philip Roth

But what affords the one with happiness affords the other with disgust. The interplay, the ridiculous interplay, enough to kill all and everyone.

— Philip Roth

Emotions, when they’re revved up, don’t change, they’re the same, fresh and raw. Everything passes? Nothing passes. The same emotions are here!

— Philip Roth

We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

— Philip Roth

Ma, you want to see physical violence done to the Jews of Newark, go to the office of the plastic surgeon where the girls get their noses fixed. That’s where the Jewish blood flows in Essex County, that’s where the blow is delivered – with a mallet! To their bones – and to their pride!

— Philip Roth

Oh, I can’t believe this is you.” “It is me!” “But – what about your father’s love?” “I am on my own!

— Philip Roth

The life he described sounded like paradise to me; that he could think to do nothing better with his time than turn sentences around seemed to me a blessing bestowed not only upon him but upon world literature.

— Philip Roth

Suppose all I have fallen in love with is that voice deliciously phrasing its English sentences? The man who died for the soothing sound of a highly calibrated relative clause.

— Philip Roth

I think a lot of those women who seem bright also seem very ferocious. What you like is that I seem bright without being ferocious, somebody who is really rather ordinary and is not determined to kick you in the teeth. But why carry it further – why marry me and have a child and settle down like everyone else to an impostor’s life?” ”Because I’ve decided to give up the artificial fiction of being myself for the genuine, satisfying falseness of somebody else. Marry me.

— Philip Roth

Why is it,” the unhappy teacher finally asked, “that for centuries people have hated you Jews?” Amy rose to her feet. She was stunned. “Don’t ask me that!” the girl said – “ask the madmen who hate us!” And she had nothing further to do with Miss Giddings as a friend – or with anyone else who asked her anything about what they couldn’t possibly understand.

— Philip Roth

Nathan, your story, as far as Gentiles are concerned, is about one thing and one thing only. Listen to me, before you go. It is about kikes. Kikes and their love of money.

— Philip Roth

All of this was why, from Quahsay, I had mailed my four published stories to Lonoff. Felix Abravanel was clearly not in the market for a twenty-three-year-old son.

— Philip Roth

He had seen how improbable it is that we should come from one another and how improbable it is that we do come from one another. Birth, succession, the generations, history – utterly improbable. He had seen that we don’t come from one another, that it only appears that we come from one another.

— Philip Roth

They are crying intensely, the dependable father whose center is the source of all order, who could not overlook or sanction the smallest sign of chaos – for whom keeping chaos far at bay had been intuition’s chosen path to certainty, the rigorous daily given of life – and the daughter who is chaos itself.

— Philip Roth

The drug calmed his soul, but did not touch it down where the blackness had reached.

— Philip Roth

It’s not being angry that’s important, it’s being angry about the right things. I told her, Look at it from the Darwinian perspective. 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

Yes, if only this and if only that, we’d all be together and alive forever and everything would work out fine.

— Philip Roth
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