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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
Couldn
Silence
Control
Everything
Restrain
Self
Dictated
Mind
Confession
Spokes
Spoke

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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!
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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.
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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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There’s no remaking reality... Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There’s no other way.
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It's the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge.
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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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It's best to give while your hand is still warm.
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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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The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions.
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Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.
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Let's hope the first comes first.
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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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It's amazing how much punishment we can take.
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Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them--at least I didn't to phrase them was to invent them and own them.
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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.
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Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews.
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The book can't compete with the screen. It couldn't compete beginning with the movie screen. It couldn't compete with the television screen and it can't compete with the computer screen I don't think. And now we have all those screens so against all those screens I think the book can't measure up.
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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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Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.
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There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed.
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