Quote

There’s no remaking reality... Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There’s no other way.

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
Remaking
Ground
Hold
Comes
Reality
Take
Way

More quotes by Philip Roth

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In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees
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--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others
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A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!
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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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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
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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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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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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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The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open.
Philip Roth
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Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism!
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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The signore...wishes her to begin at the beginning.
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.
Philip Roth
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Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.
Philip Roth
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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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My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets — no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!
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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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.
Philip Roth
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The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
Philip Roth
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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