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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
Plans
Ordered
Game
Normally
Games
Disorder
Lives
Superior
Matter
Superiors
Much
Plot
Think
Plan
Disorders
Thinking
Sex
Risky

More quotes by Philip Roth

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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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You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.
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My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets — no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!
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It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
Philip Roth
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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.
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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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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.
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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
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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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In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees
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One either imposes one's ideas or one is imposed on.
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The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy ? that is every man?s tragedy.
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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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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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The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.
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I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.
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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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A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.
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Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind.
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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!
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