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A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!

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
Jewish
Parents
Parent
Alive
Half
Men
Time
Infant
Helpless

More quotes by Philip Roth

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I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter that means you had a hard time during the Bush years.
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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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You go to someone and you think, 'I'll tell him this.' But why? The impulse is that the telling is going to relieve you. And that's why you feel awful later--you've relieved yourself, and if it truly is tragic and awful, it's not better, it's worse---the exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse.
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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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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.
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We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper.
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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.
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Being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.
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The hard part is, of course, the proximity of death. The number has no meaning as long as you're fit and healthy. But you know that you only have so much time left and you don't know how much it is. It could be a very short time.
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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?
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I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.
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I do not say correct or savory. I do not say seemly or even natural. I say serious. Sensationally serious. Unspeakably serious. Solemnly, recklessly, blissfully serious.
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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You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.
Philip Roth
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When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.
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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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
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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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The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.
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Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.
Philip Roth