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The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
Philip Roth
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Philip Roth
Age: 85 †
Born: 1933
Born: March 18
Died: 2018
Died: May 22
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Newark
New Jersey
Philip Milton Roth
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More quotes by Philip Roth
Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.
Philip Roth
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
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 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
You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.
Philip Roth
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
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
He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.
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
One either imposes one's ideas or one is imposed on.
Philip Roth
Each book starts from ashes really. I don't feel that I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell or that story to tell, but I want to be occupied with the writing process while I'm living.
Philip Roth
Too late, but I understand. That we don't perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that -- of just that.
Philip Roth
--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others
Philip Roth
I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.
Philip Roth
The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy ? that is every man?s tragedy.
Philip Roth
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.
Philip Roth
Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged -- where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.
Philip Roth
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.
Philip Roth
What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel.
Philip Roth
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
