{"author":"Philip Roth","author_id":"Philip+Roth","total_quotes":71,"quotes":[{"text":"Other people's weakness can destroy you just as much as their strength can. Weak people are not harmless. Their weakness can be their strength.","author":"Philip Roth","tags":["weakness"],"id":3464,"author_id":"Philip+Roth"},{"text":"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 internalised, 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.","author":"Philip Roth","tags":["existentialism","identity","literature"],"id":14195,"author_id":"Philip+Roth"},{"text":"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 . . .","author":"Philip Roth","tags":["on-writing","writing","writing-life"],"id":15148,"author_id":"Philip+Roth"},{"text":"Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.","author":"Philip Roth","tags":["death","life","truth"],"id":27178,"author_id":"Philip+Roth"},{"text":"I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a picnic and that I was no picnic myself.","author":"Philip Roth","tags":["behavior","difficulties","flaws","people"],"id":29377,"author_id":"Philip+Roth"},{"text":"There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.","author":"Philip Roth","tags":["fair-play","father","human-nature"],"id":43056,"author_id":"Philip+Roth"},{"text":"Simple was never that simple. Still, the self-questioning did take some time to reach him. And if there's anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it's self-questioning coming too late.","author":"Philip Roth","tags":["ignorance","mortality","self-discovery","self-knowledge"],"id":49350,"author_id":"Philip+Roth"},{"text":"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.","author":"Philip Roth","tags":["despair","grief","loneliness"],"id":55551,"author_id":"Philip+Roth"},{"text":"Stunned by how little he'd gotten over her and she'd gotten over him, he walked away understanding, as outside his reading in classical Greek drama he'd never had to understood before, how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made...","author":"Philip Roth","tags":["destiny","greek","love"],"id":61996,"author_id":"Philip+Roth"},{"text":"For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.","author":"Philip Roth","tags":["discipline","habits","life-of-the-writer","routine","writing"],"id":69970,"author_id":"Philip+Roth"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":71,"pages":8,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}