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.
– Philip Roth
A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!
– Philip Roth
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.
– Philip Roth
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.
– Philip Roth
Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?
– Philip Roth
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.
– Philip Roth
Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.
– Philip Roth
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.
– Philip Roth
The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
– Philip Roth
Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.
– Philip Roth
When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
– Philip Roth
People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.
– Philip Roth
Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off the belief it inspires is what counts.