509 Quotes by Philip Roth

Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. 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.

Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century,

The only way to have a funeral is to invite everyone who ever knew the person and just wait for the accident to happen-somebody who comes in out of the blue and says the truth. Everything else is table manners.

Some people have been reluctant to call this a bull market, because it's nothing like the 1990s. But it is a bull market -- it's just nothing like the 1990s.

No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex. It's a very risky game.... It's sex that disorders our normally ordered lives.

It's an admission of the books into perpetuity.

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!

The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop.

It seemed pretty reckless and vicious. I was just trying to depict the way it was, the way it sounded, what they talked about. This was just what I observed or imagined.