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  Quotes by Roth, Philip




Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933) is a Jewish-American novelist who is known for his 1959 collection, Goodbye, Columbus, as well as his sexually-explicit comedic novel Portnoy's Complaint (1969) and for his late-'90s trilogy comprising the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). Most of his novels contain Jewish characters and address issues of importance to American society such as assimilation, Zionism, and anti-Semitism..

"Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when."

Roth, Philip on death    Share

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"I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you -- it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists."

Roth, Philip on discretion    Share

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"Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts."

Roth, Philip on facts    Share

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"To become a celebrity is to become a brand name. There is Ivory Soap, Rice Krispies, and Philip Roth. Ivory is the soap that floats; Rice Krispies the breakfast cereal that goes snap-crackle-pop; Philip Roth the Jew who masturbates with a piece of liver."

Roth, Philip on fame    Share

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"Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology."

Roth, Philip on fiction    Share

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"A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!"

Roth, Philip on judaism and jews    Share

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"A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple."

Roth, Philip on judaism and jews    Share

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"My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!"

Roth, Philip on language    Share

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"Only in America do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedal pushers and mink stoles -- and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn't their fault they were given a gift like speech -- look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic."

Roth, Philip on mothers    Share

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"I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't."

Roth, Philip on autobiography    Share

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"It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning."

Roth, Philip on autobiography    Share

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"The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress."

Roth, Philip on progress    Share

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

Roth, Philip on publishing and publishers    Share

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"Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?"

Roth, Philip on understanding    Share

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