Philip Roth
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 March 1933
CountryUnited States of America
suicide writing roles
Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged -- where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.
hate crime knows
This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.
rose waiting surface
I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface
discipline orbit oneself
For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.
drawing yesterday people
That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration
powerful circles careers
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.
library never-quit hours
There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed.
kids thinking boys
I was gushing and I knew it. I surprised myself with my eagerness to please, felt myself saying too much, explaining too much, overinvolved and overexcited in the way you are when you're a kid and you think you've found a soul mate in the new boy down the street and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as you don't normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to.
ideas bullshit people
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.
fiction reader
The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.
gains doe mask
The question to ask about the writer isn't 'Why does he behave so badly?' but 'What does he gain by wearing this mask?
new-york people doe
I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.
mother men sick
When he is sick, every man wants his mother.
ideas
One either imposes one's ideas or one is imposed on.