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Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.
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
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Right
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Maybe
People
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More quotes by Philip Roth
You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.
Philip Roth
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.
Philip Roth
Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind.
Philip Roth
It's the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge.
Philip Roth
I work just as much as I always worked. And I can't explain the fact that there have been a series of books coming rather regularly out of me. I work most days and if you work most days and you get at least a page done a day, then at the end of the year you have 365. So the pages accumulate and then I publish the books.
Philip Roth
The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.
Philip Roth
I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.
Philip Roth
He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.
Philip Roth
In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees
Philip Roth
The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
Philip Roth
I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, Is he as crazy as I am? I don’t need that question answered.
Philip Roth
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
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
Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.
Philip Roth
Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.
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
Too late, but I understand. That we don't perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that -- of just that.
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
There's something every woman wants, and that's a man to blame.
Philip Roth
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.
Philip Roth
