Philip Roth Quotes

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

She repeats things until they are true, or until she can't tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.

The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.

Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.

Without knowing the Knower, all the knowledge that one gathers cannot be valid.

Truth is the ricochet of a prejudice bouncing off a fact.

Reality can easily become the current fantasy.

A thing is a thing, not what is said of a thing

The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.

What is reality if it isn't how we feel about things?

The photographer in Blow-Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there's a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up.

Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.

Memory is your image of perfection.

Nonsense is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on reality...Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense.

Things which we see are not by themselves what we see ... It remains completely unknown to us what the objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner of perceiving them.

People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

Ask yourself: What did I eat for breakfast today? What did I eat for dinner last night? You see how fast reality fades away?