American - Novelist | March 19, 1933 - May 22, 2018
I think I write and publish as often as I do because I can't bear being without a book to work on... I don't feel I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell, but I know I want to be occupied with the writing process while I'm living.
Philip Roth
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I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.
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Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.
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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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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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History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
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Should you protect profits? Yes. But run for the hills? No.
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With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two years your life stopped. If you had been running in the direction of your life, you had to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain boring.
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A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.
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All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.
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People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.
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Nothing keeps its promise.
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