Quotes from Philip Roth

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

You go to someone and you think, "I'll tell him this." But why? The impulse is that the telling is going to relieve you. And that's why you feel awful later—you've relieved yourself, and if it truly is tragic and awful, it's not better, it's worse—the exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse.

The pompous son of a bitch knows everything—it's too bad he doesn't know anything else.

and said that he still had his evening's reading. He did not do justice to a writer unless he read him on consecutive days and for no less than three hours at a sitting. Otherwise, despite his notetaking and underlining, he lost touch with a book's inner life and might as well not have begun. Sometimes, when he unavoidably had to miss a day, he would go back and begin all over again, rather than be nagged by his sense that he was wronging a serious author.

Well," I said, "after years and years of painting ourselves opaque, this carries us straight back to when we were sure we were transparent." "Is that it?" "Maybe. Who knows.

I don't give the same credibility to my being that other people give to theirs. Everything feels acted.

acknowledging wholeheartedly, as the enigma that it is, the pointless meaningfulness of living—

Are you always attracted to damaged women?" "I didn't know there were any other kind.

I wouldn't mind to go to New Mexico with you. To California with you. But mainly to New Jersey, to see the sea where you grew up.

Talking to Marcia about their engagement, he was almost able to look the other way and rush to embrace the security and predictability and contentment of a normal life lived in normal times.

I soon understood self-hatred to mean an internalized, though not necessarily conscious, loathing of one's recognizable group markings that culminates either in quasi-pathological efforts to expunge them or in the vicious disparagement of those who don't even know enough to try.

Their naive fucking impertinence about carnal lusting! Seducer of the young. Socrates, Strindberg, and me.

People think of history in the long term, but history, in fact, is a very sudden thing.

La gente non legge pensando all'arte: legge pensando alle persone. E le giudica per quello che sono. E come credi che giudicherà i personaggi del tuo racconto? A quali conclusioni credi che arriverà? Ci hai pensato?

For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence.

That we don't perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that—of just that.

The pride inspired in my parents by the establishment in 1948 of a homeland in Palestine that would gather in the unmurdered remnant of European Jewry was, in fact, not so unlike what welled up in me when I first came upon Lonoff's thwarted, secretive, imprisoned souls, and realized that out of everything humbling from which my own striving, troubled father had labored to elevate us all, a literature of such dour wit and poignancy could be shamelessly conceived.

across the truck's tailgate were painted the words "Barrett Electric Co. 'We'll fix your shorts.

To a dying person you can repeat yourself forever. They don't care. Just so they can still hear you talking.

among them the Democrats' defeated 1928 presidential aspirant, former New York governor Al Smith. Loudspeakers installed overnight

Opposing the father is no picnic and not opposing the father is no picnic—that's what he was discovering.

And she was game. They're all game, if you take your time and use your brains—and aren't sixty-four years old.

Whether outright government-sanctioned persecution was inevitable, nobody could say for sure, but the fear of persecution was such that not even a practical man grounded in his everyday tasks, a person who tried his best to contain the uncertainty and the anxiety and the anger and operate according to the dictates of reason, could hope to preserve his equilibrium any longer.

Il Diavolo della Piccola Città: i pettegolezzi, le gelosie, l'acrimonia, la noia, le bugie. No, i veleni provinciali non aiutano. Qui la gente si annoia, è invidiosa, la sua vita è quella che è e quella che sempre sarà, e così, senza dubitare seriamente della storia, la riferisce: al telefono, per la strada, in mensa, in aula.