509 Quotes by Philip Roth

We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper.

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.

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

Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews.

A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.

I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.

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.

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

All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.