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Being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

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
Convince
Sentences
Dark
Convinces
Sentence

More quotes by Philip Roth

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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
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One either imposes one's ideas or one is imposed on.
Philip Roth
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A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.
Philip Roth
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The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.
Philip Roth
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When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.
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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
Philip Roth
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The signore...wishes her to begin at the beginning.
Philip Roth
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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
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You take off your clothes and you're in bed with somebody, and that is indeed where whatever you've concealed, your particularity, whatever it may be, however encrypted, is going to be found out, and that's what all the shyness is all about and what everybody fears.
Philip Roth
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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.
Philip Roth
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Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.
Philip Roth
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The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open.
Philip Roth
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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!
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.
Philip Roth
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As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn't touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing.
Philip Roth
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You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.
Philip Roth
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Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off the belief it inspires is what counts.
Philip Roth
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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.
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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Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.
Philip Roth