Quotes from Philip Roth

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

Everyone becomes a part of history whether they like it or not and whether they know it or not.

There's no remaking reality... Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There's no other way.

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.

American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property--on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.

Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on.

And as Lindbergh's election couldn't have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as History, harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop.

Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.

Anything can happen to anyone, but it usually doesn't. Except when it does.

There are no reasons. She is obliged to be as she is. We all are. Reasons are in books.

Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial and, even then, bought at the price of an obstinate estrangement from oneself and one's history.

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface

other people's weakness can destroy you just as much as their strength can. Weak people are not harmless. Their weakness can be their strength.

In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees

Dreams? If only they had been! But I don't need dreams, Doctor, that's why I hardly have them—because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight!

Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it.

You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.

I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off – the sticky evidence is everywhere!

Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.

You take off your clothes and you're in bed with somebody, and that is indeed where whatever you've concealed, your particularity, whatever it may be, however encrypted, is going to be found out, and that's what all the shyness is all about and what everybody fears.