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--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others

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
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Philip Milton Roth
Determine
Fate
Understood
Fool
Shameless
Others
Utter
Strongly
Fools
Vanity

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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.
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When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.
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Let's hope the first comes first.
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Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.
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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.
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The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.
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When I was a child... I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'
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It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces.
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Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.
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Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?
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A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!
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It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
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He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.
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Turned the wrong way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied in 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.
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The book can't compete with the screen. It couldn't compete beginning with the movie screen. It couldn't compete with the television screen and it can't compete with the computer screen I don't think. And now we have all those screens so against all those screens I think the book can't measure up.
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No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex. It's a very risky game.... It's sex that disorders our normally ordered lives.
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One either imposes one's ideas or one is imposed on.
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Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged -- where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.
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The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
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Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
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