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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

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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
Going
Helpless
Novelists
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Tomorrow
Imagination
Age
Read
Novelist
Live
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More quotes by 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
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I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.
Philip Roth
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The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy ? that is every man?s tragedy.
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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Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid
Philip Roth
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World War III will be triggered off not by suppressed nationalists seeking political independence, as happened the first time around when the Serbs at Sarajevo shot the heir to the Austrian throne, but by some semiliterate, whacked-out loner who lobs a rocket into a nuclear arsenal in order to impress Brooke Shields.
Philip Roth
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Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
Philip Roth
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You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.
Philip Roth
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I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.
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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Let's hope the first comes first.
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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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 haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.
Philip Roth
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--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others
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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It's best to give while your hand is still warm.
Philip Roth
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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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A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!
Philip Roth
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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