509 Quotes by Philip Roth

When you publish a book, it’s the world’s book. The world edits it.

There had to be forces outside. The prayer went, “Lead me not in temptation.” If people were not led by others, why was the famous prayer that it was?

One either imposes one’s ideas or one is imposed on.

The music I play after dinner is not a relief from the silence but something like its substantiation: listening to music for an hour or two every evening doesn’t deprive me of the silence – the music is the silence coming true.

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.

I was gushing and I knew it. I surprised myself with my eagerness to please, felt myself saying too much, explaining too much, overinvolved and overexcited in the way you are when you’re a kid and you think you’ve found a soul mate in the new boy down the street and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as you don’t normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to.

Writing turns you into somebody who’s always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on.

You have to enjoy power, have a certain ruthlessness, to accept the beauty and not mourn the fact that it overshadows everything else. As with any exaggerated trait that sets you apart and makes you exceptional – and enviable, and hateable – to accept your beauty, to accept its effect on others, to play with it, to make the best of it, you’re well advised to develop a sense of humor.

I’m an Obama supporter. And if you’re an Obama supporter that means you had a hard time during the Bush years.