If you read the novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really

— Philip Roth

In America everything goes and nothing matters, while in Europe nothing goes and everything matters.

— Philip Roth

In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees

— Philip Roth

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.

— Philip Roth

In school, we chanted, along with our teacher, I am the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my soul, and meanwhile, within my own body, an anarchic insurrection had been launched by one of my privates-which I was helpless to put down!

— Philip Roth

... I realized that my father, of all these men, was the most obstinate, helplessly bonded to his better instincts and their excessive demands. I only then understood that he had quit his job not merely because he was fearful of what awaited us down the line should we agree like the others to be relocated, but because, for better or worse, when he was bullied by superior forces that he deemed corrupt it was his nature not to yield--in this instance, to resist either running away to Canada, as my mother urged our doing, or bowing to a government directive that was patently unjust. There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty And Abe Stanza, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.

— Philip Roth

Is that what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime's minutiae? Who could have imagined that one would have forever to remember each moment of life down to its tiniest component?

— Philip Roth

It is not our high purposes alone that make us moving creatures, but our humble needs and cravings.

— Philip Roth

It's human to have a secret, but it's just as human to reveal it sooner or later.

— Philip Roth

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 sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom. . .

— Philip Roth