“The Jewish man with parents still alive is a fifteen-year-old boy and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die.”
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Author detail
Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection *Goodbye, Columbus,* which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller *Portnoy's Complaint.* Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history *The Plot Against America.*
Quotes
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“The Jewish man with parents still alive is a fifteen-year-old boy and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die.”
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“A Jewish man with parents alive is a 15-year-old boy, and will remain a 15-year-old boy until they die.”
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“The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you be...”
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“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sa...”
“Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.”
“I turn sentences around. That’s 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...”
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“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...”
“This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion a few hours old. That can happen when people die--the argument with them drops away an...”
“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”
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“[Writing] is a pleasure for about a week and a half. When you finish a novel, you feel triumphant, until ten days later, that is, when you have to begin thinking about the undoability of the...”
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“...Who knows what is and is not proof to the crotchety ladies and chainstore owners who sit and die on Boards of Education?”
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“My traducers propound my alleged malefaction as though I have spewed venom on women for half a century. But only a madman would go to the trouble of writing 31 books in order to affirm his h...”
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“As I see it, my focus has never been on masculine power rampant and triumphant but rather on the antithesis: masculine power impaired.”
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“I said the screen will kill the reader, and it has: the movie screen in the beginning, the television screen, and now the coup de grace, the computer screen.”
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“Writing, for me, was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life.”
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“Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.”
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“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...”
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“That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then...”
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“Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.”
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“Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?”
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