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Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

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
Likely
Intelligent
Large
Understanding
Human
Manufacturer
Humans
Misunderstanding
Much
Scale
Scales

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The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid
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Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
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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!
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It's amazing how much punishment we can take.
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Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.
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Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.
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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
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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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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!
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When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.
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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.
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