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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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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
Spokes
Spoke
Couldn
Silence
Control
Everything
Restrain
Self
Dictated
Mind
Confession

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In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees
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Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.
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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.
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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.
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The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.
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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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The hard part is, of course, the proximity of death. The number has no meaning as long as you're fit and healthy. But you know that you only have so much time left and you don't know how much it is. It could be a very short time.
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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.
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Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.
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The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
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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.
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When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.
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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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The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy ? that is every man?s tragedy.
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It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces.
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Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid
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.
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One either imposes one's ideas or one is imposed on.
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When I was a child... I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'
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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.
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