Philip Roth

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank.

The fact that life transcends logic in no way invalidates logic. On the contrary, it validates it abundantly.

You think that you have a memory, but it has you!

Human existence is shown ... to be unredeemable.

How can he be so frightened of dying when he has pretty nearly always been dead?

She has always been capable of impulsiveness but now she hasn’t the time...

You see, you get dangerously involved with people, and then Jesus-you end up just trying to survive.

Funny things happen to you in this life of sin.

The more you hate, the unhappier you get.

Daybreak is always good news.

Fantasies have to be unrealistic.