Philip Roth

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.Interview in Esquire Magazine 10/10

The Jewish man with parents still alive is a fifteen-year-old boy and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die.

I don__ ask writers about their work habits. I really don__ care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they__e actually trying to find out, "Is he as crazy as I am?" I don__ need that question answered.

If you read the novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really

I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a picnic and that I was no picnic myself.

In my parents' day and age, it used to be the person who fell short. Now it's the discipline. Reading the classics is too difficult, therefore it's the classics that are to blame. Today the student asserts his incapacity as a privilege. I can't learn it, so there is something wrong with it. And there is something especially wrong with the bad teacher who wants to teach it. There are no more criteria, Mr. Zuckerman, only opinions.

It is not our high purposes alone that make us moving creatures, but our humble needs and cravings.

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.

For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.

other people's weakness can destroy you just as much as their strength can. Weak people are not harmless. Their weakness can be their strength.

Simple is never that simple.

None of us ate together: my Aunt Gladys ate at five o__lock, my cousin Susan at five-thirty, me at six, and my uncle at six-thirty. There is nothing to explain this beyond the fact that my aunt is crazy.

Memories particularly of when they weren__ being what parents are nine-tenths of the time, the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the nags of pick-that-up and you__e-going-to-be-late, keepers of the diary of her duties and routines, memories, rather, of when they found one another afresh, beyond the tensions between parental mastery and inept childish uncertainty, of those moments of respite in a family__ life when they could reach one another in calm

What are you? Do you know? What you are is you're always trying to smooth everything over. What you are is always trying to be moderate. What you are is never telling the truth if you think it's going to hurt somebody's feelings. What you are is you're always compromising. What you are is always complacent. What you are is always trying to find the bright side of things. The one with the manners. The one who abides everything patiently. The one with ultimate decorum. The boy who never breaks the code.

He was trying hard to continue to exist as himself despite the unlikeliness of everything.

You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.

I turn sentences around. That__ my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I__ frantic with boredom . . .

It's human to have a secret, but it's just as human to reveal it sooner or later.