Quotes from Philip Roth

Memories particularly of when they weren't being what parents are nine-tenths of the time, the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the nags of pick-that-up and you're-going-to-be-late, keepers of the diary of her duties and routines, memories, rather, of when they found one another afresh, beyond the tensions between parental mastery and inept childish uncertainty, of those moments of respite in a family's life when they could reach one another in calm

But how will I get out? And all at once the door was open--and there was Seldon and behind him his mother. How'd you do that? I said. I opened the door, he said. But how? He shrugged. I pushed. I just pushed. It was open all the time. And that was when I began to bawl and Mrs. Wishnow took me in her arms and said, That's okay. Things like this happen. They can happen to anyone.

nothing is more uplifting in all of life than righteous anger.

To those not yet old, being old means you've been. But being old also means that despite, in addition to, and in excess of your beenness, you still are. Your beenness is very much alive. You still are, and one is as haunted by the still-being and its fullness as by the having-already-been, by the pastness. Think of old age this way: it's just an everyday fact that one's life is at stake.

Great artists, as history reveals, have been harshly persecuted time and again by the frightened and ill-educated

Noi siamo, dopotutto, la somma delle nostre esperienze, e l'esperienza comprende non soltanto ciò che facciamo concretamente, ma anche ciò che privatamente immaginiamo.

It's about life, where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences." "Oh

You've got a good girl this time. Don't screw it up. Don't let her go.

When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

Others? He dares to call us others? He's the other. The one who looks most American—and he's the one who is least American! The man is unfit. He shouldn't be there. He shouldn't be there, and it's as simple as that!

The ending is immense. Tell it plainly.

É muito difícil ler os clássicos; logo a culpa é dos clássicos. Hoje o estudante faz valer a sua incapacidade como um privilégio. Eu não consigo aprender isto, portanto alguma coisa está errada nisto. E há especialmente alguma coisa errada com o mau professor que quer ensinar tal matéria. Deixou de haver critérios - para só haver opiniões.

Because you happen to be a writer doesn't mean you have to deny yourself the ordinary human pleasure of being praised and applauded.

For all that I announce at intervals that I want to go mad, it is apparently impossible: beyond me, beneath me. It took This for me to learn that I am a citadel of sanity.

True, he had chosen to live alone, but not unbearably alone. The worst of being unbearably alone was that you had to bear it - either that or you were sunk. You had to work hard to prevent your mind from sabotaging you by its looking hungrily back at the superabundant past.

She thinks, I'm telling him who I am. He's interested in who I am. That is true, but I am curious about who she is because I want to fuck her.

She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.

And how long will the American people stand for this treachery perpetrated by their elected president? How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds?

I am not impressed by the White House!" my father cried, hammering on the table to shut her up after she'd said "the White House" for the fifteenth time. "I am only impressed by who lives there. And the person who lives there is a Nazi.

The music I play after dinner is not a relief from the silence but something like its substantiation: listening to music for an hour or two every evening doesn't deprive me of the silence — the music is the silence coming true.

Well, good Christ, how was I supposed to know all that, Hannah? Who looks into the fine points when he's hungry? I'm eight years old and chocolate pudding happens to get me hot. All I have to do is see that deep chocolatey surface gleaming out at me from the refrigerator, and my life isn't my own.

It's no picnic up there in the egosphere.

As far as I can see there is no conquering or exorcising the past with words - words born either of imagination or forthrightness.

Where was the Jew in him? You couldn't find it and yet you knew it was there. Where was the irrationality in him? Where was the crybaby in him? Where were the wayward temptations? No guile. No artifice. No mischief. All that he had eliminated to achieve his perfection. No striving, no ambivalence, no doubleness- just the style, the natural physical refinement of a star.