Philip Roth
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 March 1933
CountryUnited States of America
lying real people
It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces.
responsibility thinking make-you-think
You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.
alive life-is periods
Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.
smart writing fiction
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.
writing judging
Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.
communication ducks bombs
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!
maps body toes
I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.
morning jobs real
Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life.
memories past imagination
Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
blue funeral waiting
The only way to have a funeral is to invite everyone who ever knew the person and just wait for the accident to happen-somebody who comes in out of the blue and says the truth. Everything else is table manners.
sex thinking games
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.
art grief writing
Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!
hatred danger hundred
The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop.
writing reality america
You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.