Philip Roth Quotes

Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.

So you have to take the good with the bad.

It seldom happens that any felicity comes so pure as not to be tempered and allayed by some mixture of sorrow.

Life is about having a good time, and it was a good time. We did some things well and some things poorly, but that was always the case.

Oh, well...up until now it had been a good day, in a horrible kind of way.

It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes.

how sad and bad and mad it was - but then, how it was sweet

Fantasy doesn't have to be fantastic. American writers in particular find this much harder to grasp. You need to have your feet on the ground as much as your head in the clouds. The cute dragon that sits on your shoulder also craps all down your back, but this makes it more interesting because it gives it an added dimension.

The same refinement which brings us new pleasures exposes us to new pains.

The sweetest pleasures soonest cloy, And its best flavour temperance gives to joy.

I don't like you, but I love you.

She worked her toes into the sand, feeling the tiny delicious pain of the friction of tiny chips of silicon against the tender flesh between her toes. That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very, very good.

Wasn't marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded. Wasn't it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt.

Life is a goddam mess...but you wouldn't want to miss it!

We thought humble and proud at the same time, all at once in love again with this painful bittersweet lovely thing called flight.

The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture; like a school-boy's holiday, with a task affixed to the tail of it.

He that would have the perfection of pleasure must be moderate in the use of it.

Pleasures are enhanced by a moderate indulgence.

Nobody's life is filled with perfect little moments. And if it were, they wouldn't be perfect little moments. They would just be normal. How would you ever know happiness if you never experience downs?

One who is in search of knowledge should give up the search of pleasure and the one who is in search of pleasure should give up the search of knowledge.

None so good that he has no faults, None so wicked that he is worth naught.

It was good, it was bad. But it was real, and that's all you have.

Business by no means forbids pleasures; on the contrary, they reciprocally season each other; and I will venture to affirm, that no man enjoys either in perfection that does not join both.

There is no light without shadow, and no psychic wholeness without imperfection.