Philip Roth Quotes

I want to make it clear that it wasn’t impotence that led me in to a reclusive existence.

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.

In our lore, the Jewish family was an inviolate haven against every form of menace, from personal isolation to gentile hostility. Regardless of internal friction and strife, it was assumed to be an indissoluble consolidation… Family indivisibility, the first commandment.

For me, as for most novelists, every genuine imaginative event begins down there, with the facts, with the specific, and not with the philosophical, the ideological, or the abstract.

What makes you a normal Jew, Nathan, is how you are riveted by Jewish abnormality.

In Israel it’s enough to live-you don’t have to do anything else and you go to bed exhausted. Have you ever noticed that Jews shout? Even one ear is more than you need.