A father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.

— Philip Roth

A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!

— Philip Roth

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

— Philip Roth

A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.

— Philip Roth

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self.... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself — a troupe of players that I have internalized, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required.... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.

— Philip Roth

Alvin didn't cry, didn't curse, didn't holler.... He was too far gone to roar on that day or even to crack. Only I did.... Only I cracked, alone, later in the one place in our house where I knew I could go to be apart from the living and all that they cannot not do.

— Philip Roth

A man whose discontents were barely known to himself, awakening in middle age to the horror of self-reflection.

— Philip Roth

Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent? Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? The detail, the immensity of the detail, the force of the detail, the weight of the detail the rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your young life like the six feet of dirt that’ll be packed on your grave when you’re dead

— Philip Roth

And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprint's, it’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into monomania

— Philip Roth

Doctor, what do you say, let's put the ID back in yid

— Philip Roth