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Let's hope the first comes first.

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
Hope
Comes
Firsts
First

More quotes by 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 signore...wishes her to begin at the beginning.
Philip Roth
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The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
Philip Roth
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One either imposes one's ideas or one is imposed on.
Philip Roth
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It's best to give while your hand is still warm.
Philip Roth
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Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid
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
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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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Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind.
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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The question to ask about the writer isn't 'Why does he behave so badly?' but 'What does he gain by wearing this mask?
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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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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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
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The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.
Philip Roth
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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.
Philip Roth
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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.
Philip Roth
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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
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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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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.
Philip Roth