Quotessence
Home / Authors / Philip Roth
Philip Roth

Philip Roth Quotes

Novelist

Filter quotes by topic

AllWritingIfsPeopleBookThinkingKnowsWorldWayMenPhilip Roth3AliveAmericanFictionHumanIdeasStainTrilogyWantYears

Famous Philip Roth Quotes

“Many of the Kiwis appearing in powerful business circles around the world come from accounting backgrounds. Yet often people have preset ideas of how an accountant walks, talks, smells - although not in the business community. For me it is a career that offers a lot of variety and challenges and I love it.”

PeopleWorldIdeasCommunityChallengesWalksPowerfulCareersOffersSmellCirclesBackgroundsAround The WorldVarietyAccountingAppearingAccountantsKiwi
Author:Philip Roth
Create image

“When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years – whether it is being the writer or being the lover – turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.”

WorldWritingYearsHumansIdeasJobsTurnsWrittenLoversActivityExcitementFiftyHuman ActivityUnwrittenExuberance
Author:Philip Roth
Create image

“You asked if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there's been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it's a way of life for them. It doesn't mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book — if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don't. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them.”

PeopleIfsWorldWayWantMeanStillsI CanBookCultureReadingAsksAnswersFictionChangedReturnReaderScandal
Book:Conversations with Philip Roth
Create image

“The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate.”

PeopleThinkingWorldPainWealthSecretSilenceSourceExpectationsAdvantageTricksChosenIntimateDelusionStringsIntensityMinimumOrganizeEntanglementLiving AlonePlenitude
Book:The Human Stain: A Novel
Create image

“People were standing up everywhere shouting, "This is me! This is me!" Every time you looked at them they stood up and told you who they were, and the truth of it was that they had no more idea who or what they were than he had. They believed their flashing signs, too. They ought to be standing up and shouting, "This isn't me! This isn't me!" They would if they had any decency. "This isn't me!" Then you might know how to proceed through the flashing bullshit of this world.”

PeopleIfsKnowsWorldIdeasMightKnow HowThis WorldOughtStandingBullshitDecencyShoutingStood UpThis Is Me
Author:Philip Roth
Create image

“World War III will be triggered off not by suppressed nationalists seeking political independence, as happened the first time around when the Serbs at Sarajevo shot the heir to the Austrian throne, but by some semiliterate, whacked-out "loner" who lobs a rocket into a nuclear arsenal in order to impress Brooke Shields.”

WorldFirstsWarPoliticalOrderHappenedShotsFirst TimeIndependenceSeekingNuclearWar Of The WorldsWorld War IiWorld War IThronesImpressShieldsRocketsArsenalLonerHeirsPolitical Independence
Book:Novels & other narratives, 1986-1991
Create image