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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.
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
Anything
Failed
Even
Explanation
Thing
Explain
Trying
Misery
Going
Stage
Doesn
Another
Certain
More quotes by Philip Roth
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
Being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.
Philip Roth
Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.
Philip Roth
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.
Philip Roth
The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel- on the body of every Jewish child!- not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU'LL BE A PARENT AND YOU'LL KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE.
Philip Roth
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.
Philip Roth
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.
Philip Roth
The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
Philip Roth
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
In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees
Philip Roth
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.
Philip Roth
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
Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out? Does anyone find anyone that enchanting unless they have sexual business with them? Who else are you enchanted by? Nobody.
Philip Roth
Too late, but I understand. That we don't perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that -- of just that.
Philip Roth
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.
Philip Roth
The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.
Philip Roth
'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
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
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
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.
Philip Roth