Quotes from Philip Roth

I know I'm not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration — it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time." He went on: "I can't face any more days when I write five pages and throw them away. I can't do that anymore. --New York Times, 18 Nov. 2012

Before that night, I'd had no idea my father was so well suited for wreaking havoc or equipped to make that lightning-quick transformation from sanity to lunacy that is indispensable in enacting the unbridled urge to destroy.

For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.

It's amazing how much punishment we can take.

And who's next, Mr. and Mrs. America, now that the Bill of Rights is no longer the law of the land and the racial haters are running the show

he was seething suddenly with remorse, because of having done what he'd done and because he hadn't done more. Seething with outrage too, about Basel more than anything--as outraged by what Nathan had got right there as by what he'd got wrong, as much by what he'd been making up as by what he was reporting. It was the two in combination that were particularly galling, especially where the line was thin and everything was given the most distorted meaning.

Remorse, predictably, was the form taken by her distress, the merciless whipping that is self-condemnation, as if in times as bizarre as these there were a right way and a wrong way that would have been clear to somebody else, as if in confronting such predicaments the hand of stupidity is ever far from guiding anyone.

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.

Ciò che noi sappiamo è che, in un modo non stereotipato, nessuno sa nulla. Non puoi sapere nulla. Le cose che sai... non le sai. Intenzioni? Motivi? Conseguenze? Significati? Tutto ciò che non sappiamo è stupefacente. Ancor più stupefacente è quello che crediamo di sapere.

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

I don't know anybody. I turn sentences around, and that's it.

Curiously, the darkness seemed to have something to do with Harriet, Ron's intended, and I thought for a time that it was simply the reality of Harriet's arrival that had dramatized the passing of time: we had been talking about it and now suddenly it was here — just as Brenda's departure would be here before we knew it.

Purity. Serenity. Simplicity. Seclusion. All one's concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the grueling, exalted, transcendent calling. I looked around and I thought, This is how I will live.

It was puzzling to own trees - they were not owned the way a business os owned or even a house is owned. If anything, they were held in trust. In trust. Yes, for all of posterity,...

How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn't see it with my own eyes, I'd think I was having a hallucination.

Gogol, Kafka y compañía… va a tener serios problemas si sigue por ese camino.

In a burst of calculated sincerity—miscalculated sincerity, it turns out—I tell one of the girls how the sight of her breasts pressing against her arms had led me to wish I were those arms. And is this so different, I ask, pushing on with the charm, from Romeo, beneath Juliet's balcony, whispering, "See! How she leans her cheek upon her hand:/ O! That I were a glove upon that hand,/ That I might touch that cheek." Apparently it is quite different.

Writing is) the transformation, through an elaborate impersonation, of a personal emergency into a public act (in both senses of that word).

The ordeal is part of the commitment Esquire Interview 10/10

torn by desires that are repugnant to my conscience, and a conscience repugnant to my desires.

hoe weemoedig hij soms ook mocht kijken naar zulke echtparen in de vallende schemering of op zondagmiddagen, de week had nog meer uren en hun leven was niets voor hem, als hij zijn melancholie weer de baas was

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

devi fare solo questo, presentare una buona e coerente versione di te stesso, e nessuno verrà mai a farti domande.

Fear unmans us. Fear degrades us. Fostering less fear—that's your job and mine.