Quotes from Philip Roth

A Jewish man with parents alive is a 15-year-old boy, and will remain a 15-year-old boy until they die.

Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.

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

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!

History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.

It's the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge.

I rarely, if ever, had another book in mind while I was writing the previous book. Each book starts from ashes, really.

The novelist's obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word.

Writing, for me, was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life.

My goal would be to find a big, fat subject that would occupy me to the end of my life, and when I finish it, I'll die. What's agony is starting; I hate starting them. I just want to keep writing now and end when it ends.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

I've stopped reading fiction. I don't read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don't have the same interest in fiction that I once did.

With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two years your life stopped. If you had been running in the direction of your life, you had to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain boring.

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

I work most days and if you work most days and you get at least a page done a day, then at the end of the year you have 365. So the pages accumulate and then I publish the books.

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism!

My traducers propound my alleged malefaction as though I have spewed venom on women for half a century. But only a madman would go to the trouble of writing 31 books in order to affirm his hatred.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets —no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.

There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again...

I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.