Philip Roth Quotes - Page 5

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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

  Trying, Misery, Stage

  Philip Roth (2010). “The Humbling”, p.12, Random House

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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!

  Philip Roth

  Art, Temptation, Desire

  Philip Roth (1998). “I Married a Communist”, p.230, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.

  Philip Roth

  Enjoyable

  Philip Roth (2001). “The Dying Animal”, p.34, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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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; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate.

  Philip Roth

  Pain, Thinking, People

  Philip Roth (2000). “The Human Stain: A Novel”, p.44, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• For someone whose roots in America were strong but only inches deep, and who had no experience, such as a Catholic child might, of an awesome hierarchy that was real and felt, baseball was a kind of secular church that reached into every class and region of the nation and bound millions upon millions of us together in common concerns, loyalties, rituals, enthusiasms, and antagonisms. Baseball made me understand what patriotism was about, at its best.

  Philip Roth

  Loyalty, Baseball, Strong

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• I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on. But routinely when I finish a book, I think, "What will I do? Where will I get an idea?" And a kind of low-level panic sets in. And then eventually something happens. I don't know. If I knew how it happened I would repeat the process, but I don't know - something just occurs to me.

  Philip Roth

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

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• 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

  Book, Done, Publish

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

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• You go to someone and you think, 'I'll tell him this.' But why? The impulse is that the telling is going to relieve you. And that's why you feel awful later--you've relieved yourself, and if it truly is tragic and awful, it's not better, it's worse---the exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse.

  Philip Roth

  Thinking, Exhibitionism, Awful

  Philip Roth (1997). “American Pastoral”, p.90, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• You don't want to repeat yourself for one. You don't want to fall into the clichés for another. And you don't want to be licentious really. You want to be descriptive, if you can be. And you're not setting out to arouse anybody.

  Philip Roth

  Fall, Want, Repeats

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

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• I don't wish to be a slave any longer to the stringent exigencies of literature.

  Philip Roth

  Wish, Literature, Slave

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• 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

  Inspiring, Children, Parent

  Philip Roth (2005). “Novels, 1967-1972”

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• Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed.

  Philip Roth

  Writing, Years, President

  Philip Roth, George John Searles (1992). “Conversations with Philip Roth”, p.178, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I’m interested in what people do with the chaos in their lives and how they respond to it, and simultaneously what they do with what they feel like are limitations. If they push against these limitations, will they wind up in the realm of chaos, or will they push against limitations and wind up in the world of freedom?

  Philip Roth

  Wind, People, World

  FaceBook post by Philip Roth from Feb 20, 2012

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• A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!

  Philip Roth

  Men, Parent, Half

  Philip Roth (1969). “Portnoy's complaint”, Random House Inc

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• When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

  Philip Roth

  Book, World, Publish

  Philip Roth, George John Searles (1992). “Conversations with Philip Roth”, p.111, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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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.

  Philip Roth

  Beautiful, Breakup, Thinking

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• Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.

  Philip Roth

  Inspire, Audacity, Literature

  Philip Roth, George John Searles (1992). “Conversations with Philip Roth”, Univ Pr of Mississippi

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• Eventually the writing takes time. What I want to do is get the story down and I want to know what happens as I write my way into the knowledge of the story.

  Philip Roth

  Writing, Take Time, My Way

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

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• Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it.

  Philip Roth

  Literature, Mess

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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.

  Philip Roth

  Memories, Boys, Childhood

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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

  Ideas, History, Stories

  Philip Roth (1989). “The facts: a novelist's autobiography”, Vintage

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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.

  Philip Roth

  Knowing, Entering

  Philip Roth (2006). “Everyman”, p.190, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.

  Philip Roth

  Week, Novel

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

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• A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.

  Philip Roth

  Crazy, Poison, Needs

  Philip Roth, George John Searles (1992). “Conversations with Philip Roth”, p.180, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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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.

  Philip Roth

  Clothes, Bed, May

  Philip Roth (2000). “The Human Stain: A Novel”, p.113, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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