509 Quotes by Philip Roth

The Academy tends to like to mix the expected with the unexpected choices,

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.

I was back in touch with my place,

It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces.

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 human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property--on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.

The fact that a stock like Microsoft could fall so much is a sign that there is very little investment activity in the market. It is a symptom of the domination of traders and hedge funds in the market.

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.

When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters