509 Quotes by Philip Roth

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself – a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.

What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for.

Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn’t restrain myself and spoke my mind.

What I wanted was the tiniest thing in the world: to be like everyone else.

In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees.

Waarom zou ik behoefte hebben aan een monument in mijn naam terwijl er op straat zo’n feestbanket rondloopt?

Simple was never that simple. Still, the self-questioning did take some time to reach him. And if there’s anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it’s self-questioning coming too late.

You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn’t annihilate human nature.

I know I’m not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration – it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation.