Quotes from Philip Roth

Even a monster has to be from somewhere—even a monster needs parents. But parents don't need monsters.

Hypergamy. Do you know what it is?" "Never heard of it." "Bedding women of a superior social class. Desire based on a superior social class.

Without an old country link and a strangling church like the Italians, or the Irish, or the Poles, without generations of the American forebears to bind you to American life, or blind you by your loyalties to its deformities, you could read whatever you wanted and write however and whatever you pleased. Alienated? Just another way to say 'set free.' A Jew set free from Jews - yet only by steadily maintaining self-consciousness as a Jew. That was the thrilling paradoxical kicker.

L'immagine che abbiamo l'uno dell'altro. Strati e strati d'incomprensione. L'immagine che abbiamo di noi stessi. Vana. Presuntuosa. Completamente distorta. Ma noi tiriamo dritto e viviamo di queste immagini. «Lei è così, lui è così, io sono così. È andata così per questi motivi…» Basta.

Though frankly… Tarnapol, as he is called, is beginning to seem as imaginary as my Zuckermans anyway, or at least as detached from the memoir-ist – his revelations coming to seem like still another "useful fiction," and not because I am telling lies. I am trying to keep to the facts. Maybe all I'm saying is that words, being words, only approximate the real thing, and so no matter how close I come, I only come close.

There had to be forces outside. The prayer went, Lead me not in temptation. If people were not led by others, why was the famous prayer that it was?

Now that he was no longer grounded in his hate, we were going to talk about women.

Was she impersonating someone, acting from a script prepared beforehand? Or was I dealing with a person who could not be dealt with because she was mad?

I saw that everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say. What you said and did made a difference, all right, but not the difference you intended.

Nothing could appear to be more human than refusing to believe extinction possible so long as you were encircled by luscious eggplants and ripe tomatoes[..]

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!

Why is the smallest thing I do for pleasure immediately illicit—while the rest of the world rolls laughing in the mud! Pig? She ought to see the charges and complaints that are filed in my office in a single morning: what people do to one another, out of greed and hatred! For dough! For power! For spite! For nothing!

I'm the only one who gives her a whole can of tuna for lunch, and I'm not talking dreck, either. I'm talking Chicken of the Sea, Alex.

It was the first time I saw my father cry. A childhood milestone, when another's tears are more unbearable than one's own.

The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

I'll be curious to see how we all come out someday. It could be an interesting story. You're not so nice and polite in your fiction, he said. You're a different person.

Now Sentimental Education doesn't read as if Flaubert was having fun; Letter to His Father doesn't read as if Kafka was having fun; The Sorrows of Young Werther sure as hell doesn't read as if Goethe was having fun. Sure, Henry Miller seems like he's having fun, but he had to cross three thousand miles of Atlantic before saying 'cunt'.

That was how he got there, seeking asylum, hounded--the forlorn reason for a straight arrow so assertively uxorious, so intensely and spotlessly monogamous, hurling himself at such an extraordinary moment into a situation he would have thought he hated, the shameful fiasco of being untrue.

One has periods of ghastliness. And then long periods of sort of quiet and love.

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.

my imagination I am unfaithful to everybody, by the way, not just to you.

The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy—that is every man's tragedy.

I'm looking at myself," he said, ecstatically, "except it's you.

It did not matter that the idea made no sense. Sabbath's sixty-four years of life had long ago released him from the falsity of sense.