509 Quotes by Philip Roth

Is that what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime’s minutiae? Who could have imagined that one would have forever to remember each moment of life down to its tiniest component?

I am not impressed by the White House!” my father cried, hammering on the table to shut her up after she’d said “the White House” for the fifteenth time. “I am only impressed by who lives there. And the person who lives there is a Nazi.

As for God, it was easy to think kindly of Him in a paradise like Indian Hill. It was something else in Newark – or Europe or the Pacific – in the summer of 1944.

It is Jerry’s theory that the Swede is nice, that is to say passive, that is to say trying always to do the right thing, a socially controlled character who doesn’t burst out, doesn’t yield to rage ever. Will not have the angry quality as his liability, so doesn’t get it as an asset either. According to this theory, it’s the no-rage that kills him in the end. Whereas aggression is cleansing or curing.

How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.” Though.

The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral – into the indigenous American berserk.

Let me tell you about the nap. It's absolutely fantastic. When I was a kid, my father was always trying to tell me how to be a man. And he said - I was maybe nine - he said, 'Philip, whenever you take a nap, take your clothes off and put a blanket over you, and you're going to sleep better.' Well, as with everything, he was right.

Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.

As for the kind of writer I am? I am who I don't pretend to be.