Philip Roth Quotes

Do me a favor, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass_ I happen also to be a human being!

Doctor Spielvogel, it alleviates nothing fixing the blame - blaming is still ailing, of course, of course - but nonetheless, what it with these Jewish parents, , that they were able to make us little...

For hours after the three consecutive calls—and after the predictable banality and futility of the pep talk, after the attempt to revive the old esprit by reviving memories of his colleagues' lives, b...

Gone were the days when Zuckerman had only to worry about Zuckerman making money: henceforth he would have to worry about his money making money.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial and, even then, bought at the price of an...

Here is someone not set up for life's working out poorly, let alone for the impossible.But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibili...

How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination. Though

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.

I couldn't imagine anything that could have made Coleman more of a mystery to me than this unmasking. Now that I knew everything, it was as though I knew nothing

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....

I was gushing and I knew it. I surprised myself with my eagerness to please, felt myself saying too much, explaining too much, overinvolved and overexcited in the way you are when you're a kid and you...

I wouldn’t so much as stick my head in a pool hall. Oh, look, this is as far as I go explaining what I am and am not like. I will not explain myself one more time. I will not make an inventory of my a...

If he had another brother he would call him. But for a brother he has only Jerry and Jerry has only him. For a daughter he has only Merry. For a father she has only him. There is no way around any of...

In short, dozens of conflicting, truncated impressions were already teasing to be understood, but the wisest course seemed to me to keep them to myself so long as I didn't begin to know what they adde...

Mr. Levov was one of those slum-reared Jewish fathers whose rough-hewn, undereducated perspective goaded a whole generation of striving, college-educated Jewish sons: a father for whom everything is a...

The disruption of the anticipated American future that was simply to have unrolled out of the solid American past, out of each generation’s getting smartersmarter for knowing the inadequacies and limi...

You don't have to work in a mental hospital to know about husbands and wives.

إن شك المرء ، سخريته ، الإحساس السليم السياسي الثقافي ، الذي يحفظه بعيدا عن التحركات الجماعية ، كان درعا واقيا .

A nervous, undernourished girl who continually looked down the front of her gown as though there was some sort of construction project going on under her clothes.

They'll say, 'He never recovered from that breakdown and this was the result. It had to be the breakdown--not even he was that dreadful a novelist.