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And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.
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
Stories
Kind
Thinking
Life
Spokes
People
Spoke
Turn
Turns
Lives
More quotes by 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
It's amazing how much punishment we can take.
Philip Roth
Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them--at least I didn't to phrase them was to invent them and own them.
Philip Roth
The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel- on the body of every Jewish child!- not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU'LL BE A PARENT AND YOU'LL KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE.
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
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.
Philip Roth
Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?
Philip Roth
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
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
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
Let's hope the first comes first.
Philip Roth
Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind.
Philip Roth
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
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
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
It's the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge.
Philip Roth
Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.
Philip Roth
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.
Philip Roth
To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.
Philip Roth
I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.
Philip Roth
