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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

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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
Always
Somebody
Pathological
Life
Wrong
Wreck
Turns
Wrecks
Doesn
Phenomena
Else
Someday
May
Draws
Right
Illusion
Writing
Completely
Perversity

More quotes by Philip Roth

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You take off your clothes and you're in bed with somebody, and that is indeed where whatever you've concealed, your particularity, whatever it may be, however encrypted, is going to be found out, and that's what all the shyness is all about and what everybody fears.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid
Philip Roth
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The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.
Philip Roth
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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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I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.
Philip Roth
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I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.
Philip Roth
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It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces.
Philip Roth
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As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn't touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing.
Philip Roth
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I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.
Philip Roth
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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.
Philip Roth
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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
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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
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The signore...wishes her to begin at the beginning.
Philip Roth
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I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.
Philip Roth
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The question to ask about the writer isn't 'Why does he behave so badly?' but 'What does he gain by wearing this mask?
Philip Roth