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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
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Philip Roth
Age: 85 †
Born: 1933
Born: March 18
Died: 2018
Died: May 22
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
University Teacher
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Newark
New Jersey
Philip Milton Roth
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Life
Sentences
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More quotes by Philip Roth
The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.
Philip Roth
The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.
Philip Roth
I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.
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It's amazing how much punishment we can take.
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Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself
Philip Roth
In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees
Philip Roth
Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism!
Philip Roth
The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions.
Philip Roth
At a certain stage of misery, you'll try anything to explain what's going on with you, even if you know it doesn't explain a thing and it's one failed explanation after another.
Philip Roth
I know I'm not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation.
Philip Roth
Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.
Philip Roth
Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. 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.
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What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel.
Philip Roth
And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.
Philip Roth
A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!
Philip Roth
Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off the belief it inspires is what counts.
Philip Roth
A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.
Philip Roth
I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.
Philip Roth
The signore...wishes her to begin at the beginning.
Philip Roth
World War III will be triggered off not by suppressed nationalists seeking political independence, as happened the first time around when the Serbs at Sarajevo shot the heir to the Austrian throne, but by some semiliterate, whacked-out loner who lobs a rocket into a nuclear arsenal in order to impress Brooke Shields.
Philip Roth