509 Quotes by Philip Roth

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist’s desire to prove that he’s good. The terrible temptation of idealism!

I’m so drunk my head doesn’t even need my neck.

It’s amazing how much punishment we can take.

The profusion of the stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die.

No one with seven books in New York City settles for one piece of ass. That’s what you get for a couplet.

There’s something every woman wants, and that’s a man to blame.

To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don’t read the novel really.

There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness – not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it.

Inhibition doesn’t grow on trees, you know – takes patience, takes concentration, takes a dedicated and self-sacrificing parent and a hard-working attentive little child to create in only a few years’ time a really constrained and tight-ass human being.