Quotes from Philip Roth

The important thing was to forget about Iris's hair and let her speak, let her find her fluency and, from the soft streaming of her own words, create for him his apologia.

He thinks, Because ... [x9]. But all he says to his son is, 'Because I don't want to lose my children.

By the time she was their age, she'd seen all the Kurosawas, all the Tarkovskys, all the Fellinis, all the Antonionis, all the Fassbinders, all the Wertmullers, all the Satyajit Rays, all the René Clairs, all the Wim Wenderses, all the Truffauts, the Godards, the Chabrols, the Resnaises, the Rohmers, the Renoirs, and all these kids have seen is Star Wars.

Now, thanks to you, my beloved little darling, being dead is as awful as being alive was.

First you make a farce of suicide, now again you make a farce of life." "I don't know any other way to do it, Mother. Leave me be. Shut up. You don't exist. There are no ghosts." "Wrong. There are only ghosts.

The Swede had loved that story all his life. Who wrote it? Nobody, as far as he could remember. They'd just studied it in grade school. Johnny Appleseed, out there everywhere planting apple trees. That bag of seeds. I loved that bag.

Something always came along to make you keep living

I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE.

Silk aveva qualcosa che la faceva sempre tornare all'infanzia e alla paura che ha il bimbo precoce di essere visto per quello che è; ma anche alla paura che ha il bimbo precoce di non essere sufficientemente guardato. Temeva di essere smascherata, moriva dalla voglia di essere al centro dell'attenzione: ecco il suo dilemma.

The motive for writing serious literature is to write serious literature. You want to rebel against society? I'll tell you how to do it - write well .

You want monogamy outside marriage and adultery inside marriage.

The experience of psychoanalysis was probably more useful to me as a writer than as a neurotic, although there may be a false distinction there.

I learned that back there in Weequahic in 1944 I'd lived through a summerlong social tragedy that didn't have to be a lifelong personal tragedy too.

As a self-imposed challenge, repressive puritanism is fine with me, but it is Titoism, Drenka, inhuman Titoism, when it seeks to impose its norms on others by self-righteously suppressing the satanic side of sex.

Though on the morning after the election disbelief prevailed, especially among the pollsters, by the day after that everybody seemed to understand everything, and the radio commentators and the news columnists made it sound as if Roosevelt's defeat had been preordained.

intenté escribir lo que fue la «historia de mi vida» en los bosques, inmediatamente después de mi fuga del campo de concentración.

You do only the right thing, the right thing and the right thing and the right thing, going back all the way. You try to be a thoughtful person, a reasonable person, an accomodating person, and then this happens. Where is the sense of life?

But may I ask, Marcus, merely out of curiosity, how you manage to get by in life—filled as our lives inevitably are with trial and tribulation—lacking religious or spiritual guidance?" "I get straight A's, sir.

Lindbergh was the first famous living American whom I learned to hate—just as President Roosevelt was the first famous living American whom I was taught to love—and so his nomination by the Republicans to run against Roosevelt in 1940 assaulted, as nothing ever had before, that huge endowment of personal security that I had taken for granted as an American child of American parents in an American school in an American city in an America at peace with the world.

What's shocking is not His monstrous features—plenty of gods are monstrous, it seems almost to have been a prerequisite—but that there's no recourse from Him. No power beyond His. The most monstrous feature of God, my friends, is the totalitarianism. This vengeful, seething God, this punishment-ordaining bastard, is ultimate! Mind if I have a Pepsi?

Suddenly she looked a little like General Noriega.

Lindbergh can deal with Hitler, they said, Hitler respects him because he's Lindbergh. Mussolini and Hirohito respect him because he's Lindbergh.

No solo eso; es que, además, la realidad puede permitirse el lujo de ser increíble, inexplicable, de situarse fuera de toda proporción.

America wasn't a fascist country and wasn't going to be, regardless of what Alvin had predicted. There was a new president and a new Congress but each was bound to follow the law as set down in the Constitution. They were Republican, they were isolationist, and among them, yes, there were anti-Semites—as indeed there were among the southerners in FDR's own party—but that was a long way from their being Nazis.