Philip Roth Quotes – Quoterati

Best Quotes by Philip Roth (Top 10)

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.
Philip Roth
The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open.
Philip Roth
He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.
Philip Roth
Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.
Philip Roth
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.
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.
Philip Roth
The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.
Philip Roth
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.
Philip Roth
Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.
Philip Roth
All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.
Philip Roth

More Philip Roth Quotes

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.
Philip Roth
My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets âno, they're little gifts, containing meanings!
Philip Roth
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.
Philip Roth
Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?
Philip Roth
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.
Philip Roth
It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
Philip Roth
A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!
Philip Roth
Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.
Philip Roth
When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
Philip Roth