Philip Roth

[on the European preoccupation with America] The power in any society is with those who get to impose the fantasy. It is no longer, as it was for centuries throughout Europe, the church that imposes its fantasy, as it did for 12 years in Nazi Germany and for 69 years in the Soviet Union. Now the fantasy that prevails is the all-consuming, voraciously consumed popular culture, seemingly sponsored by, of all things, freedom. The young especially live according to the beliefs that are thought up for them by the society's most unthinking people and by the businesses least impeded by innocent ends. Ingeniously as their parents and teachers may attempt to protect the young from being drawn, to their detriment, into the moronic amusement park that is now universal, the preponderance of the power is not with them. Show less «

As I see it, my focus has never been on masculine power rampant and triumphant but rather on the antithesis: masculine power impaired. I have hardly been singing a paean to male superiority but rather representing manhood stumbling, constricted, humbled, devastated and brought down. My intention is to present my fictional men not as they should be but vexed as men are. Show less «

Whoever looks for the writer's thinking in the words and thoughts of his characters is looking in the wrong direction. Seeking out a writer's 'thoughts' violates the richness of the mixture that is the very hallmark of the novel. The thought of the novelist that matters most is the thought that makes him a novelist. The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters - in the juxtaposition of those characters and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make: their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized. Show less «

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 of your life, you had to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain boring. Show less «

[on having been nominated for, but never awarded, a Nobel Prize for Literature] I wonder if I had called 'Portnoy's Complaint' 'The Orgasm Under Rapacious Capitalism', if I would thereby have earned the favor of the Swedish Academy. Show less «

[clearing up a misquote] I do not believe the novel is dying. I said the readership is dying out. That's a fact and I've been saying it for fifteen years. I said the screen will kill the reader and it has. The movie screen is the beginning, the television screen, and now the coup de grace, the computer screen. Show less «

[on frequently being labeled a 'misogynist'] Misogyny, a hatred of women, provides my work with neither a structure, a meaning, a motive, a message, a conviction, a perspective, or a guiding principle.. 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 thirty-one books in order to affirm his hatred. It is my comic fate to be the writer these traducers have decided I am not. They practice a rather commonplace form of social control: You are not what you think you are. Your are what 'we' think you are. You are what we choose for you to be. Well, welcome to the subjective human race. The imposition of a cause's idea of reality on the writer's idea of reality can only mistakenly be called 'reading' Show less «

Donald J. Trump is ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency. [Trump] wields a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English. Show less «

[on deciding to retire, 2012] I sat around for a month or two trying to think of something else (to write about) and I thought 'Maybe it's over, maybe it's over. I gave myself a dose of fictional juice by rereading writers I hadn't read in fifty years and who had meant quite a lot when I read them. I read Dostoyevsky, I read Conrad - two or three books by each. I read Turgenev, two of the greatest short stories ever written, 'First Love' and 'The Torrents of Spring'. And then I decided to reread my own books, and I began from the last book forward, casting a cold eye. And I thought, 'You did all right'. But when I got to 'Portnoy' - 'Portnoy's Complaint', published in 1969, I had lost interest, and I didn't read the first four books. So I read all that great stuff, and then I read my own and I knew I wasn't going to get another good idea, or if I did, I'd have to slave over it.I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration..not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time. Show less «

This will come as a great shock to young people, but in 1951 you could make it through college unscathed by oral sex. Show less «

It's been a good time for the novel in America, but I can't say I know what accounts for it. Maybe it's the absence of certain things that somewhat accounts for it. The American novelist's indifference to, if not contempt for, 'critical' theory. Aesthetic freedom unhampered by all the high-and-mighty isms and their humorlessness.. Writing that is uncontaminated by political propaganda - or even social responsibility. The absence of any 'school' of writing. In a place so vast, no single geographic center from which the writing originates. Anything but a homogeneous population, no basic national unity, no single national character, social calm utterly unknown, even the general obtuseness about literature, the inability of many citizens to read any of it with even minimal comprehension confers a certain freedom. And surely the fact that writers really don't mean a goddamn thing to nine-tenths of the population doesn't hurt. It's inebriating. Show less «

You know, I needed my life as a springboard for my fiction. I have to have something solid under my feet when I write. I'm not a fantasist. I bounce up and down on the diving board and I go into the water of fiction. But I've got to begin in life so I can pump life into it throughout. Show less «

[impressions of his life work, having re-read all his novels] My conclusion, after I'd finished, echoes the words spoken by an American boxing hero of mine, Joe Lewis. When he was asked upon his retirement about his long career, Joe sweetly summed it up in just ten words. 'I did the best I could with what I had'. Show less «

[on retiring from writing] Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for fifty years I faced the next page, defenseless and unprepared. Wrting 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. It was also my good luck that happiness didn't matter to me and I had no compassion for myself. Now? Now I am a bird sprung from a cage instead of a bird in search of a cage. The horror of being caged has lost its thrill. Show less «