Philip Roth Quotes

There are instances when we are like horses, we psychologists, and grow restless: we see our own shadow wavering up and down before us. A psychologist must look away from himself in order to see anything at all.

I find myself fascinating.

You have to attempt to be objective about yourself.

I find myself a fascinating subject.

I don't interest myself that much.

I think it's important for one to take a certain distance from oneself.

Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.

So I observe life a little bit, rather than participating in it.

I like to think of myself as an observer.

I feel like I'm still at a point where I have a lot to learn from watching myself, so I find that it helps. But it's always weird.

It's kind of weird talking about yourself all the time.

This autobiography of mine is a mirror, and I am looking at myself in it all the time. Incidentally I notice the people that pass along at my back - I get glimpses of them in the mirror - and whenever they say or do anything that can help advertise me and flatter me and raise me in my own estimation, I set these things down in my autobiography.

Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually ... I know what we could make of it if people only thought we could dare look at ourselves.

I don't want to be so analytical of my own life, because if I start to be analytical of my own life, maybe I'll choose not to believe anything that's going on. But, the fact of the matter is, I've experienced both sides of it now. Sides where you have a great time with people on set, and then you do just step away. And it's not malicious. It's just that people go back and live their lives and do whatever.

I'm a very vicious critic of myself.

I've been living with myself all of my life, so I know all of me. So when I watch me, all I see is me. It's boring.

I am not very introspective.

Much of the time, we're transfixed by all of the ways we can reflect ourselves into the world. And we can barely find the time to reflect deeply back in on our own selves.

A journal of the 'subjective' kind I have always thought foolish, as nurturing a morbid self -consciousness in the writer; and yet, alone so much as I am, it is well to have some sort of a ventilator from the interior.

If I can avoid looking at myself, I will. I don't care to examine myself or see much of what I do. I never care how I look.

Mistrust first impulses; they are nearly always good.

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about myself.