“ You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. 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. ”
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“ I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste. ”
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“ That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration ”
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“ This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion a few hours old. That can happen when people diethe argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration. In which estimate lies the greater realitythe uncharitable one permitted us before the funeral, forged, without any claptrap, in the skirmish of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering afterwardthis even an outsider can't judge. The sight of a coffin can effect a great change of heartall at once you find you are not so disappointed in the person who is deadbut what the sight of a coffin does for a mind in its search for the truth, this I don't profess to know. ”
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“ 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- Copy
“ Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it. Interview in Esquire Magazine 10/10 ”
- Philip Roth- Copy
“ [Writing] is a pleasure for about a week and a half. When you finish a novel, you feel triumphant, until ten days later, that is, when you have to begin thinking about the undoability of the next novel. [When I start a book I am always a beginner.] Always. Always. You can say one of the reasons that I've quit is that after fifty years I was still an amateur – a clumsy amateur lacking confidence and wholly befuddled for months and months at the beginning of every new book. Now, luckily, I remain an amateur only at the rest of life. [You don't gain any confidence little by little.] Not at the start of a book. It's a rare writer who is confident at the outset. You are just the opposite – you are doubtridden, steeped in uncertainty and doubt. Henry James, the great powerhouse of American fiction, the novelist's novelist – our Proust – put it perfectly while speaking, in a story of his, of the novelist's vocation. “We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. ”
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“ ...Who knows what is and is not proof to the crotchety ladies and chainstore owners who sit and die on Boards of Education? ”
- Philip Roth- Copy
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“ ...Who knows what is and is not proof to the crotchety ladies and chainstore owners who sit and die on Boards of Education? ”
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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. ”
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“ The Academy tends to like to mix the expected with the unexpected choices. ”
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“ When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it. ”
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“ 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. ”
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“ Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged — where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only. ”
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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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“ The Academy tends to like to mix the expected with the unexpected choices. ”
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“ To become a celebrity is to become a brand name. There is Ivory Soap, Rice Krispies, and Philip Roth. Ivory is the soap that floats; Rice Krispies the breakfast cereal that goes snap-crackle-pop; Philip Roth the Jew who masturbates with a piece of liver. ”
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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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“ Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding? ”
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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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“ I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't. ”
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“ I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you — it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.'. ”
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“ A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple. ”
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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. ”
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