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Philip Roth quotes - page 2
I'm sure the liars as skillful and persistent and devious as you reach the point where it's the one you are lying to, and not you, who seems like the one with the serious limitations.
Philip Roth
That body is still new to her, she's still trying it out, thinking it through, a bit like a kid walking the streets with a loaded gun and deciding whether he's packing it to protect himself or to begin a life of crime.
Philip Roth
I'm not trying to turn you into a bourgeois, Naomi. If the bed is too luxurious, we can do it on the floor.
Philip Roth
Circumcision is startling, all right, particularly when performed by a garlicked old man upon the glory of a newborn body, but then maybe that's what the Jews had in mind and what makes the act seem quintessentially Jewish and the mark of their reality. Circumcision makes it clear as can be that you are here and not there, that you are out and not in - also that you're mine and not theirs.... Quite convincingly, circumcision gives the lie to the womb-dream of life in the beautiful state of innocent prehistory, the appealing idyll of living "naturally," unencumbered by man-made ritual. To be born is to lose all that. The heavy hand of human values falls upon you right at the start, marking your genitals as its own.
Philip Roth
This indictment is a kind of fever that flares up from time to time. It flared up after "Defender of the Faith," again after "Goodbye Columbus," and understandably it went way up - to about 107 - after "Portnoy's Complaint." Now there's just a low-grade fever running, nothing to worry about.
Philip Roth
When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters. This isn't to say I wished to change places. I didn't envy their persecution and the way in which it heightens their social importance. I didn't even envy them their seemingly more valuable and serious themes. The trivialization, in the West, of much that's deadly serious in the East is itself a subject, one requiring considerable imaginative ingenuity to transform into compelling fiction.
Philip Roth
The jealously. That poison. And unprovoked. Jealous even when she tells me she's going ice-skating with her eighteen-year-old brother.
Philip Roth
Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.
Philip Roth
Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline.
Philip Roth
It's best to give while your hand is still warm.
Philip Roth
You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.
Philip Roth
Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.
Philip Roth
Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.
Philip Roth
Everyone becomes a part of history whether they like it or not and whether they know it or not.
Philip Roth
There are no uncontaminated angels.
Philip Roth
Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid.
Philip Roth
I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface.
Philip Roth
In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees.
Philip Roth
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.
Philip Roth
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...
Philip Roth
Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.
Philip Roth
Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.
Philip Roth
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