Philip Roth Quotes

Always pick a redhead, Ee-oh, Manny said. he'll give you the best fight in the world. Redhead'll never quit.

American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in huma...

Among the writers he was reading when he wrote these stories in the 1950s—and he was reading all the time, all kinds of books, dozens and dozens of them—were David Riesman, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamu...

And how long will the American people stand for this treachery perpetrated by their elected president? How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds?

Anything can happen to anyone, but it usually doesn't. Except when it does.

As far as I can see there is no conquering or exorcising the past with words - words born either of imagination or forthrightness.

As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn't touch the number of Americans who...

Before that night, I’d had no idea my father was so well suited for wreaking havoc or equipped to make that lightning-quick transformation from sanity to lunacy that is indispensable in enacting the u...

But in Old Rimrock, NJ, in 1995, when the Ivan Ilyches come trooping back to lunch at the clubhouse after their morning round of golf and started to crow, It doesn't get any better than this, they may...

But they don't deserve to be winning!And who does in this world, Roland? Only the gifted and the beautiful and the brave? What about the rest of us, Champ? What about the wretched, for example? What a...

But why did you go, my mother asked him, when it was bound to upset you like this? I went, he told her, because every day I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in America? How can...

Can anyone be utterly without thoughtfulness? The answer is yes.

Curiously, the darkness seemed to have something to do with Harriet, Ron's intended, and I thought for a time that it was simply the reality of Harriet's arrival that had dramatized the passing of tim...

Doctor, I had never had anybody like her in my life, she was the fulfillment of my most lascivious adolescent dreams– but marry her, can she be serious? You see, for all her preening andperfumes, she...

Either foreswear fucking others or the affair is over.

Gogol, Kafka y compañía… va a tener serios problemas si sigue por ese camino.

He calls his brother. it is the wrong brother from whom to seek consolation, but what can he do? When it comes to consolation it is always the wrong brother, the wrong father, the wrong mother, the wr...

I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off – the sticky evidence is everywhere!

It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn't stop, when the speculation and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn't stop, when the moral obligation to explain to one's...

It's no picnic up there in the egosphere.