Quotes About Philip Roth

A]s Norman Mailer pointed out decades ago, and Philip Roth not long afterwards, niceness is the enemy. Every soft stroke from society is like the pfft of an aerosol can as it eats up a few more atoms of our brain's delicate ozone, and furthers our personal cretinization.

If you were placing bets on which author would write the tenderest, most moving book about fatherhood, Philip Roth would probably come in at the bottom of the list.

You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.

Philip Roth has made a cottage industry of unlikable characters, but compared with Mickey Sabbath, the furious and profane protagonist of 'Sabbath's Theater,' Roth's earlier creations seem like Winnie the Pooh.

I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.

O escritor americano Philip Roth, falecido neste maio de 2018, insistia que a literatura não é o "concurso de beleza moral" em que hoje se tenta transformá-la a golpes de politicamente correto, inclusão social e análogos.

I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did, and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.

A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal.

There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.

I was enamored of New York City intellectual life and was really into Philip Roth because I was raised by self-loathing Midwesterners who were from southern Illinois, who felt like fish out of water when they came to the East Coast when I was a kid.

Syllabus for Advanced Creative Writing Suggested Reading The Speed Queen, Stewart O'Nan Zuckerman Unbound, Philip Roth Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser

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.

I enjoy a misogynist so long as they have a wicked sense of humor and know, on some level, that they're pigs. This is why I enjoy Philip Roth but not Saul Bellow or James Salter.

The loveliest fairy tale of childhood is that everything happens in order.

I am not impressed by the White House!" my father cried, hammering on the table to shut her up after she'd said "the White House" for the fifteenth time. "I am only impressed by who lives there. And the person who lives there is a Nazi.

The ordeal is part of the commitment Esquire Interview 10/10

If only I could have nourished myself upon the depths of his vulgarity, instead of that too becoming a source of shame. Shame and shame and shame and shame—every place I turn something else to be ashamed of.

Would that I were still a ludicrous character in his lousy book!

my imagination I am unfaithful to everybody, by the way, not just to you.

But this had happened to me more than once in my life: I had refused to allow convention to determine my conduct, only to learn, after I'd gone my own way, that my bedrock feelings were sometimes more conventional than my sense of unswerving moral imperative.

There's a plot afoot all right, and I'll gladly name the forces propelling it - hysteria, ignorance, malice , stupidity, hatred, and fear

He does not glorify the state at the expense of the individual but, to the contrary, encourages entrepreneurial individualism and a free enterprise system unencumbered by interference from the federal government. Where is the fascist statism? Where is the fascist thuggery?

Makarska and Madamaska.

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.