Quotes by Philip Roth

“Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?”

“My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isnt just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where youve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words arent only bombs and bullets / no, theyre little gifts, containing meanings!”

“I write fiction and Im told its autobiography, I write autobiography and Im told its fiction, so since Im so dim and theyre so smart, let them decide what it is or it isnt.”

“I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you -- it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.”

“When you publish a book, its the worlds book. The world edits it.”

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

“When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters”

“Only in America do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedal pushers and mink stoles / and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isnt their fault they were given a gift like speech / look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic.”

“Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.”

“Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.”

“Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.”

“It isnt that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your historys meaning.”

“Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.”

“History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

“Some people have been reluctant to call this a bull market, because its nothing like the 1990s. But it is a bull market -- its just nothing like the 1990s.”

“Theres no way in hell cash is about to come roaring back into the market.”

“Should you protect profits? Yes, ... But run for the hills? No.”

“Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline.”

“The fact that a stock like Microsoft could fall so much is a sign that there is very little investment activity in the market. It is a symptom of the domination of traders and hedge funds in the market.”

“Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.”