Quote

In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees

Philip Roth

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Trees
Childhood
Tree
Grew
Started
Life
Sage
Climbing

More quotes by Philip Roth

Image
Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
Philip Roth
Image
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
Image
A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!
Philip Roth
Image
Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.
Philip Roth
Image
Let's hope the first comes first.
Philip Roth
Image
There's something every woman wants, and that's a man to blame.
Philip Roth
Image
--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others
Philip Roth
Image
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
Image
Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.
Philip Roth
Image
Many of the Kiwis appearing in powerful business circles around the world come from accounting backgrounds. Yet often people have preset ideas of how an accountant walks, talks, smells - although not in the business community. For me it is a career that offers a lot of variety and challenges and I love it.
Philip Roth
Image
You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.
Philip Roth
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think you're a wonder. You're beautiful. You're mature. You are, I admit, vastly more experienced than I am. That's what threw me. I was thrown. Forgive me.
Philip Roth
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.
Philip Roth
Image
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
Image
'Haunted by the past' is a commonplace phrase because it's a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, 'haunted', the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become.
Philip Roth
Image
The signore...wishes her to begin at the beginning.
Philip Roth