Philip Roth Quotes

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

The foundations of our lives are far more fragile than we think. So we are severely shaken when life turns out to have a will of its own.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.

When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.

When I see an image in my head that compels me, where there's this mystery about what's going to happen next or could happen next, I'll be intrigued. There are so many scripts that you read, and you know exactly what's going to happen, and there aren't too many where you can't tell within the first 20 pages where it's going.

It is an endless procession of surprises. The expected rarely occurs and never in the expected manner.

Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

Sometimes they keep us in the dark, but it's TV, so sometimes they keep us in the dark because even they don't know yet. You know what I mean? So, it sort of develops as it goes along and according to various needs that arise.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

Without continuity, men would become like flies in summer.

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

Who likes surprises? Nobody I know likes surprises. But facts change on the ground.

No man can tell what the future may bring forth

History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.

It's very easy to think that the way things are is the way things will stay, and life just isn't like that.

The older I get, the more I'm surprised with life. Things don't end up the way you think they will.

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.

You can never figure out what the future sounds like. As soon as you make it, it's the past.

We expect surprises. There has to be surprises.

You can't change what time has in store for you, as the only constant that I've known is change.

Anything that's given to you can be taken away from you at any time.

Most things don't stay the way they are very long.