Quotes from Philip Roth

Routinely, when I finish a book, I think 'What will I do? Where will I get an idea?' And a kind of low-level panic sets in.

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

For sex scenes, I just write about someone eating a sandwich and replace "ham & cheese hoagie" with "perfect breasts."

The radio was playing "Easter Parade" and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin "Easter Parade" and "White Christmas."… Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.

The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents.

Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I'm living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in the Jewish joke—only it ain't no joke!

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.

Here where the literary culture is held hostage, the art of narration flourishes by mouth. In Prague, stories aren't simply stories; it's what they have instead of life.

But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy—that is every man's tragedy.

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

He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.

The closest we can come to the truth about reality is in the fictions that we create about it.

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 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.

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

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

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 -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

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.

You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.

The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.

Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.