Quotes from Philip Roth

To have enslaved America with this hocuspocus! To have captured the mind of the world's greatest nation without uttering a single word of truth! Oh, the pleasure we must be affording the most malevolent man on earth!

Aside from how I look, I act younger than I am, too." "That you can expect to get worse.

Never before—the great refrain of 1942.

Sheila would know. She knew it all. Yes, she'd have an answer to that one too. . . . She'd come so far, Sheila had said, she'd gotten so much stronger I thought that she could make it on her own. She's a strong girl, Seymour. She's a crazy girl. She's crazy! She's troubled. And the father plays no role with the troubled daughter? I'm sure he played plenty of a role. I just thought something terrible had happened at home.

In nome della ragione, si cerca sempre un motivo più elevato, un significato più profondo: allora avevo ancora l'abitudine di sforzarmi di essere ragionevole anche sull'irragionevole e cercare la complessità nelle cose semplici. Esigevo risposte dalla mia intelligenza, quando non erano affatto necessarie. Pensavo: non può essere così meschino e insulso come sembra. Questo non può essere che un decimo della sua storia. Deve avere, dentro, qualcosa di più.

The Israelis will have saved their state by destroying their people.

For I had come, you see, to submit myself for candidacy as nothing less than E. I. Lonoff's spiritual son, to petition for his moral sponsorship and to win, if I could, the magical protection of his advocacy and his love.

The messiness of marriage and children and career and all that—I've already realized the futility of it all without having had to go through it all.

Tanta istruzione, e non serve a nulla. Nulla può isolare dal più infimo livello del pensiero.

However much you may have hated me, why don't you come back so we can continue with our linear, logical life like all the other couples who hate each other?

Actually, we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them - at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them

Conflictul interior al evreilor care vor s? se confunde cu ceilalÈ›i È™i, în acelaÈ™i timp, s? ias? în eviden??, care insist? c? sînt diferiÈ›i È™i care insist? c? nu sînt cu nimic diferiÈ›i...

What a paradox. Well, you can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.

It's a hard thing to be a jew... it's a harder thing to stay one.

In the days of the Romance Run, each time you went back to the same whorehouses and you brought nylons to your favorite girls.

You can store us like shoes or ship us like lettuce. The simpleton who invented the coffin was a poetic genius and a great wit.

For me, the passing of time has provided me with subjects I never had before. Subjects I can now look at from a historical perspective. Like the anti-communist era in America. I lived through that. I was a boy; I didn't find a way to write about it until many years later. The same with the Vietnam War.

I work all day, morning and afternoon, just about every day. If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book.

If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really.

The most enviable genius in literary history is the guy who invented alphabet soup: nobody knows who he is.

He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance. And where does God figure in this? Why does He set one person down in Nazi-occupied

Anyhow, I took out my glasseye to sleep, and when I woke up I couldn't remember where I'd put it.

Quizá lo hayas olvidado, pero ni siquiera en Nuremberg sentenciaron a todo el mundo a morir.

This is not the position in life that I had hoped to fill. I want to be an obstetrician. Who quarrels with an obstetrician? Even the obstetrician who delivered Bugsy Siegel goes to bed at night with a clear conscience.