When you publish a book, it’s the world’s book. The world edits it.
—Philip Roth
Topics: Books, Publishers, Publishing
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
Topics: Judgment
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
Topics: Writing, Autobiography
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
Topics: Religion, Judaism, Jews
Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline.
—Philip Roth
My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets — no, they’re little gifts, containing meanings!
—Philip Roth
Topics: Words, Language
Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.
—Philip Roth
Topics: Death, Dying
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
Topics: Religion, Jews, Judaism
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
Topics: Autobiography
If there’s anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it’s self-questioning coming too late.
—Philip Roth
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Saul Bellow Canadian-born American Novelist
Kurt Vonnegut American Novelist
Bernard Malamud American Novelist
Nelson Algren American Novelist
Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
William Styron American Novelist
William Faulkner American Novelist
Toni Morrison American Novelist
Robert Penn Warren American Novelist, Poet
Ray Bradbury American Science-Fiction Writer