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

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
Childhood
Tree
Grew
Started
Life
Sage
Climbing
Trees

More quotes by Philip Roth

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Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.
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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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
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The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.
Philip Roth
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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
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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
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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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The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.
Philip Roth
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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
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One either imposes one's ideas or one is imposed on.
Philip Roth
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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.
Philip Roth
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The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy ? that is every man?s tragedy.
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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Let's hope the first comes first.
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.
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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It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces.
Philip Roth
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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!
Philip Roth
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When I was a child... I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'
Philip Roth
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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.
Philip Roth