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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, The Humbling
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.
PHILIP ROTH, The Humbling
The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
PHILIP ROTH, New York Times Book Review, Jul. 15, 1979
Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?
PHILIP ROTH, The Counterlife
All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.
PHILIP ROTH, The Human Stain
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.
PHILIP ROTH, American Pastoral
Beginning a book is unpleasant. I’m entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that’s finally everything. I type out beginnings and they’re awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it—that’s what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive. Okay, I say to myself, that’s your beginning, start there; that’s the first paragraph of the book.
PHILIP ROTH, Paris Review, fall 1984
You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.
PHILIP ROTH, American Pastoral
I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk.
PHILIP ROTH, The Guardian, Dec. 13, 2005
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.
PHILIP ROTH, Deception: A Novel
The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open.
PHILIP ROTH, The Dying Animal
I would quit while you're ahead. Really, it's an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it's not any good. I would say just stop now. You don't want to do this to yourself. That's my advice to you.
PHILIP ROTH, advice to a young writer, "Writer meets Roth," New York writer Julian Tepper's blog
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!
PHILIP ROTH, Portnoy's Complaint
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, The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography
I don't wish to be a slave any longer to the stringent exigencies of literature.
PHILIP ROTH, Le Monde, special issue, Jan. 2013
Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out? Does anyone find anyone that enchanting unless they have sexual business with them? Who else are you enchanted by? Nobody.
PHILIP ROTH, The Dying Animal
All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self.... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself — a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required.... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.
PHILIP ROTH, The Counterlife
That is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.
PHILIP ROTH, The Human Stain
The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.
PHILIP ROTH, The Plot Against America
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, Paris Review, fall 1984
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.
He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.
PHILIP ROTH, American Pastoral
Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.
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, The Dying Animal
It's best to give while your hand is still warm.
The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.
PHILIP ROTH, The Human Stain
Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.
PHILIP ROTH, The Human Stain
Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
PHILIP ROTH, The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography
You tasted it. Isn't that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That's all we're given in life, that's all we're given of life. A taste. There is no more.
PHILIP ROTH, The Dying Animal
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.
PHILIP ROTH, Portnoy's Complaint
When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years – whether it is being the writer or being the lover – turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.
PHILIP ROTH, Le Monde, special issue, Jan. 2013
It's a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, "Momma, do we believe in winter?"
PHILIP ROTH, Portnoy's Complaint
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.
PHILIP ROTH, "My Life as a Writer," New York Times, Mar. 2, 2014
Each book starts from ashes.
PHILIP ROTH, interview with Cynthia Haven, "The Book Haven"
The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters, in the juxtaposition of those characters and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make — their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized.
PHILIP ROTH, "My Life as a Writer," New York Times, Mar. 2, 2014
The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.
PHILIP ROTH, The Telegraph, Mar. 29, 2014
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, interview with Cynthia Haven, "The Book Haven"
You asked if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there’s been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it’s a way of life for them. It doesn’t mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book — if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don’t. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them.
PHILIP ROTH, The Paris Review, fall 1984
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