Philip Roth
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 March 1933
CountryUnited States of America
admission books books-and-reading
It's an admission of the books into perpetuity.
everybody graduated life plain running stop
With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two years your life stopped. If you had been running in the direction of your life, you had to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain boring.
thrill horror lost
The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.
battle age massacres
Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.
materials happens
Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.
fun people unjust
People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.
commitment writing use
I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.
playfulness seriousness closest
Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.
maps body toes
I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.
loyalty daughter intelligent
Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself
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
loyalty baseball strong
For someone whose roots in America were strong but only inches deep, and who had no experience, such as a Catholic child might, of an awesome hierarchy that was real and felt, baseball was a kind of secular church that reached into every class and region of the nation and bound millions upon millions of us together in common concerns, loyalties, rituals, enthusiasms, and antagonisms. Baseball made me understand what patriotism was about, at its best.
punishment suffering
It's amazing how much punishment we can take.
discipline orbit oneself
For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.