509 Quotes by Philip Roth

Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.

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.

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.

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface

And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprintit’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania

Dreams? If only they had been! But I don't need dreams, Doctor, that's why I hardly have them—because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight!

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

Many of the Kiwis appearing in powerful business circles around the world come from accounting backgrounds. Yet often people have preset ideas of how an accountant walks, talks, smells - although not in the business community. For me it is a career that offers a lot of variety and challenges and I love it.

It's the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge.