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It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces.

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
Amazing
Lies
Behinds
Behind
Lying
Faces
Real
Sustain
People
Mask

More quotes by Philip Roth

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I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again.
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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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Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.
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A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!
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It's the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge.
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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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Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
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The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy ? that is every man?s tragedy.
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You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.
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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.
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At a certain stage of misery, you'll try anything to explain what's going on with you, even if you know it doesn't explain a thing and it's one failed explanation after another.
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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.
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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.
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'Haunted by the past' is a commonplace phrase because it's a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, 'haunted', the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become.
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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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The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.
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
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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.
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.
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There's something every woman wants, and that's a man to blame.
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