Philip Roth Quotes

A book is the only real escape from this fallen world. Aside from death.

You may not be able to change the course of government, but you can achieve some peace. And books were the path to that. I grew up in a house where books were everywhere.

The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.

There is no frigate like a book

Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book.

I just hope that readers and publishers continue to appreciate good writing and good storytelling in all their various forms. And I hope that people continue to read books, even though we have so many other options for entertainment.

Be you writer or reader, it is very pleasant to run away in a book.

I could step out of this sad life like it's an old sorry dress.

When she wanted to escape her life, she read books

Half the time I pick up a book, that's what I'm trying to get.

The importance of reading, for me, is that it allows you to dream.

All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.

The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not a different airport.

It doesn't matter what people tell you. It doesn't matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction.

I was grateful to be away from all that familiarity, to have a chance to do something anonymously.

It's because of libraries that books like mine get recommended to book clubs and avid readers, who in turn pass them onto others looking to be whisked away from the world for a little while...and perhaps to learn a bit about themselves in the process.

Books are packaged dreams.

Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.

There's a certain moment when you realize that you've actually just left the planet for a bit and that nobody can touch you. . .When it works, baby, you've got wings.

Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling’s world within a world; Twain’s slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave?

I was born in Bayonne, New Jersey. I grew up in the projects. I never went anywhere. But I have lived a thousand lives and I’ve loved a thousand loves. I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.

Shaking the past, making my break, taking control, that's what it takes.