509 Quotes by Philip Roth

You be greater than your feelings. I don’t demand this of you – life does. Otherwise you’ll be washed away by feelings. You’ll be washed out to sea and never seen again.

I don’t wish to be a slave any longer to the stringent exigencies of literature.

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

Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid.

Sometimes you’re lucky and sometimes you’re not. Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance – the tyranny of contingency – is everything. Chance is what I believed Mr. Cantor meant when he was decrying what he called God.

The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.

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 fingerprint’s, it’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.

Politics is the great generalizer and literature the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other – they are in an antagonistic relationship.

One has periods of ghastliness. And then long periods of sort of quiet and love.