Philip Roth (1933–2018,) fully Philip Milton Roth, was an American novelist and short-story writer. He used his Jewish background and his college days for the source of many of his novels and other works.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, he attended Bucknell University and Chicago University. His upbringing was Jewish conservative and lower-middle-class. An uncompromising, tough-minded writer, he recurrently annoyed Jewish organizations with his portrayal of Jews as proficient at scheming and compromise; his writings on sexual matters created conflict with conservatives, who restricted access to his books.
Roth launched his standing with the short-story collection Goodbye Columbus (1959.) His best-known novel is Portnoy’s Complaint (1969.) Other works include Zuckerman Bound (1985,) Operation Shylock (1993,) Sabbath’s Theater (1995,) and American Pastoral (1997; Pulitzer.)
In Roth’s later years, his works such as Everyman (2006) were informed by a progressively unadorned obsession with mortality and with the failure of the aging body and mind. Indignation (2008; film 2016) is narrated from the afterlife by a man who died at age 19. The Humbling (2009; film 2014) depicts an aging actor who realizes that he has lost his talent and is not capable of working. A polio epidemic is at the focus of Nemesis (2010,) set in his hometown in 1944.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Philip Roth
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.
—Philip Roth
It isn’t 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 history’s meaning.
—Philip Roth
Topics: Legacy, Autobiography
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.
—Philip Roth
Topics: Judgment, Judging
A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!
—Philip Roth
Topics: Religion, Jews, Judaism
When you publish a book, it’s the world’s book. The world edits it.
—Philip Roth
Topics: Books, Publishers, Publishing
Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.
—Philip Roth
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction
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
Topics: Religion, Judaism, Jews
If there’s anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it’s self-questioning coming too late.
—Philip Roth
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.
—Philip Roth
Topics: Facts
Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.
—Philip Roth
Topics: Death, Dying
I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.
—Philip Roth
Topics: Legacy, Autobiography, Writing
For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can’t beat the nasty side of existence.
—Philip Roth
The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
—Philip Roth
Topics: Progress
My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets—no, they’re little gifts, containing meanings!
—Philip Roth
Topics: Language, Words
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 isn’t their fault they were given a gift like speech—look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic.
—Philip Roth
Topics: Mothers
Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?
—Philip Roth
Topics: Understanding
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
Saul Bellow Canadian-born American Novelist
Kurt Vonnegut American Novelist
Bernard Malamud American Novelist
Nelson Algren American Novelist
William Styron American Novelist
William Faulkner American Novelist
Toni Morrison American Novelist
Katherine Anne Porter American Writer
Robert Penn Warren American Novelist, Poet