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Quote by Philip Roth

“The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.”

Work

In this alternate history novel, the story unfolds in the early 1940s, where the United States is facing a different political landscape. A charismatic political figure gains power, leading to a scenario where the country is not at war with Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a Jewish family as they navigate the challenges and dangers posed by this new regime. more

Author

Philip Roth

Philip Roth (1933-2018) was one of America's most influential contemporary novelists, renowned for his profound explorations of Jewish-American identity, sexuality, politics, and the human condition. His breakthrough work, "Portnoy's Complaint" (1969), became a landmark in American literature. Roth received two National Book Awards and was a multiple-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. Over his six-decade career, he published more than 30 books that significantly shaped American fiction. He passed away in New York City on May 22, 2018, at age 85. more

“Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed.”

Writing Years Has Beens Facts President Novel Pieces Wickedness Accused Crude Prophetic Futuristic Satirist Anti-american President Reagan

Book:Conversations with Philip Roth

Source: Conversations with Philip Roth

“No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex. It's a very risky game.... It's sex that disorders our normally ordered lives.”

Thinking Knows Matter Games Sex Plans Superiors Plot Disorder

Book:The Dying Animal

Source: The Dying Animal

“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.”

World Writing Years Humans Ideas Jobs Turns Written Lovers Activity Excitement Fifty Human Activity Unwritten Exuberance

Author:Philip Roth

“The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters - in the juxtaposition of those characters and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make: their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized.”