Quote

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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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
History
Bind
Facts
Construct
Stories
Constructs
Ideas
Autobiography
Sequence
Unravels
Hypothesis
Subordinate
Meaning
Persuasive
Force
Subordinates

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It's amazing how much punishment we can take.
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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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Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out? Does anyone find anyone that enchanting unless they have sexual business with them? Who else are you enchanted by? Nobody.
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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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Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life.
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Let's hope the first comes first.
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I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.
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He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.
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The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.
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Never in his life had occasion to ask himself, Why are things the way they are? Why should he bother, when the way they were was always perfect? Why are things the way they are? The question to which there is no answer, and up till then he was so blessed he didn't even know the question existed.
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Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews.
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Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid
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It's best to give while your hand is still warm.
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There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed.
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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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Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.
Philip Roth
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I know I'm not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation.
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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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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
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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