Quotes from Philip Roth

You have the body of an old man, the life of an old man, the past of an old man, and the instinctive force of a two-year-old.

No es preciso tener una visión evolucionada de la vida para ansiar poder, ni para alcanzarlo. De hecho, una visión evolucionada de la vida puede ser el peor obstáculo, mientras que la carencia de esa visión puede ser la ventaja más espléndida.

Una universidad era una universidad: que fueras a una cualquiera y acabaras licenciándote era lo único que le importaba a una familia tan poco mundana como la mía.

There is no punishment too extreme for the crazy bastard who came up with the idea of fidelity. To demand of human flesh fidelity.

What after all does it consist of? You put your dick some place and moved it back and forth and stuff came out the front.

Yes, yes, yes, he felt uncontrollable tenderness for his own shit-filled life. And a laughable hunger for more. More defeat! More disappointment! More deceit! More loneliness! More arthritis! More missionaries! God willing, more cunt! More disastrous entanglement in everything. For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence.

Instead, employing the disguise of my own face and name, I listened intently to all the suppositions spawned by his unbearable grievance, to the suffering spilling out of him in every word; I studied him with the coldhearted fascination and intense excitement of a well-placed spy.

The outrage, the disgust inspired in my parents by the gentiles, was beginning to make some sense: the goyim pretended to be something special, while we were actually their moral superiors. And what made us superior was precisely the hatred and the disrespect they lavished so willingly upon us! Only what about the hatred we lavished upon them?

I don't believe lies are something to stand on. I believe lies are something to build on.

That is about the strongest bond in the world, the mother and the little boy. There couldn't be anything stronger.

Anyone with any brains understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind.

that the Jews were victims before they were conquerors and that they are conquerors only because they are victims.

If he no longer gave a shit, why did he give a shit?

Quando la tragedia umana si è compiuta, la si passa ai giornalisti affinché, banalizzandola, la trasformino in spettacolo.

I am more of a menace than I realize. This is serious. Premature senility. Senilitia, dementia, hell-bent-for-disaster erotomania.

None of us ate together: my Aunt Gladys ate at five o'clock, my cousin Susan at five-thirty, me at six, and my uncle at six-thirty. There is nothing to explain this beyond the fact that my aunt is crazy.

é straziante la violenza, quando scoppia in una casa: come vedere i vestiti su un albero dopo un'esplosione. puoi essere pronto a vedere la morte, ma non i vestiti sull'albero. E tutto per il fatto che mio padre non riusciva a capire che la natura di Alvin non era mai stata riformabile, nonostante i predicozzi e le minacce che l'affetto gli ispirava: tutto perché lo aveva preso in casa per salvarlo da ciò che semplicemente era nella sua natura diventare.

And this, I realized, is the excruciating scrupulosity, the same maddening, meticulous attention to every last detail that makes you great, that keeps you going and got you through and now is dragging you down. Standing with E. I. Lonoff over the disobedient arm of his record player, I understood the celebrated phenomenon for the first time: a man, his destiny, and his work—all one. What a terrible triumph!

He'd never lost the simple pleasure, which went way back, of making people uncomfortable, comfortable people especially.

While I held the letter in my hand and as carefully as I could--and as Coleman would have me do--appraised the choice of words and their linear deployment as if they'd been composed not by Delphine Roux but by Emily Dickinson...

I would quit while you're ahead. Really, it's an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it's not any good. I would say just stop now. You don't want to do this to yourself. That's my advice to you.

Tivesse ele mantido um diário de dor, o único registro teria sido uma palavra: eu.

the love thrust upon the Swede seemed actually to deprive him of feeling.

Guys with small dry lips, they turn me off, or if they smell bookish—you know, this dry pencil smell of men.