Philip Roth Quotes

A Jewish man with parents alive is a 15-year-old boy and will remain a 15-year-old boy until they die.

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

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.