Philip Roth

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

I think you're a wonder. You're beautiful. You're mature. You are, I admit, vastly more experienced than I am. That's what threw me. I was thrown. Forgive me.

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.

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.

Never in his life had occasion to ask himself, "Why are things the way they are?" Why should he bother, when the way they were was always perfect? Why are things the way they are? The question to which there is no answer, and up till then he was so blessed he didn't even know the question existed.

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.

Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it.

This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.

Too late, but I understand. That we don't perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that -- of just that.

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.

You go to someone and you think, 'I'll tell him this.' But why? The impulse is that the telling is going to relieve you. And that's why you feel awful later--you've relieved yourself, and if it truly is tragic and awful, it's not better, it's worse---the exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse.

It's best to give while your hand is still warm.

He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.

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 had homes and families and hated the whole thing.

The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.

Everyone becomes a part of history whether they like it or not and whether they know it or not.

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.

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.

You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.

Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.