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No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex. It's a very risky game.... It's sex that disorders our normally ordered lives.
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
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Matter
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More quotes by 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
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
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 signore...wishes her to begin at the beginning.
Philip Roth
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
I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.
Philip Roth
I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.
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 something every woman wants, and that's a man to blame.
Philip Roth
Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline.
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
Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.
Philip Roth
--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others
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
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
Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.
Philip Roth
Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.
Philip Roth
Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.
Philip Roth
It's the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge.
Philip Roth
Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
Philip Roth