Philip Roth Quotes

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

Biography is the best history.

History is what we would make of it.

Biography is the best form of history.

The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

The history of my life must begin by the earliest circumstance which my memory can evoke; it will therefore commence when I had attained the age of eight years and four months.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.

History's like a story in a way: it depends on who's telling it.

Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

There is properly no history; only biography.

History is not just a story related by a fool.

History is a fiction which actually happened; fiction is history which could have happened.

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.

This may be a little bit of a provocative thing to say, but the memoirist doesn't owe the reader anything other than a good story and the inclining of the mind in the direction of memory. Of course, the memoirist is not allowed to make things up. But the really skilled memoirist knows what to leave in and what to leave out to serve the story. In autobiography you can't do that.

The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history.

My friends have made the story of my life.

Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.

History is not a catalogue but...a convincing version of events.

History is an illogical record. It hinges on nothing. It is a story that changes, and has accidents, and recovers with scars.

I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.

History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.