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Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.
Philip Roth -
And he couldn't do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.
Philip Roth
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Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline.
Philip Roth -
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 -
There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.
Philip Roth -
Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.
Philip Roth -
Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?
Philip Roth -
As I see it, my focus has never been on masculine power rampant and triumphant but rather on the antithesis: masculine power impaired.
Philip Roth
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In the eighties, a self-assured knucklehead whose unsurpassable hollowness and hackneyed sentiments and absolute blindness to every historical complexity became the object of national worship and, esteemed as a 'great communicator' no less, won each of his two terms in a landslide.
Philip Roth -
The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
Philip Roth -
I do the same kind of rewriting that I do in the shorts that I do in long books - and that is a lot. The book really comes to life in the rewriting.
Philip Roth -
Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.
Philip Roth -
My traducers propound my alleged malefaction as though I have spewed venom on women for half a century. But only a madman would go to the trouble of writing 31 books in order to affirm his hatred.
Philip Roth -
A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!
Philip Roth
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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 -
Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body.
Philip Roth -
Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.
Philip Roth -
That body is still new to her, she's still trying it out, thinking it through, a bit like a kid walking the streets with a loaded gun and deciding whether he's packing it to protect himself or to begin a life of crime.
Philip Roth -
History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Philip Roth -
Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.
Philip Roth
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I'm sure the liars as skillful and persistent and devious as you reach the point where it's the one you are lying to, and not you, who seems like the one with the serious limitations.
Philip Roth -
To become a celebrity is to become a brand name. There is Ivory Soap, Rice Krispies, and Philip Roth. Ivory is the soap that floats; Rice Krispies the breakfast cereal that goes snap-crackle-pop; Philip Roth the Jew who masturbates with a piece of liver.
Philip Roth -
Turned the wrong way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied in 'History', harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.
Philip Roth -
For me, the passing of time has provided me with subjects I never had before. Subjects I can now look at from a historical perspective. Like the anti-communist era in America. I lived through that. I was a boy; I didn't find a way to write about it until many years later. The same with the Vietnam War.
Philip Roth