Philip Roth Quotes

It is perfectly American to be wrong.

Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.

One of the illusions that we live by is that we can really know anybody else, and we're often surprised by traits in people that we thought we knew very well. The struggle to overcome loneliness, which is sort of our universal burden, leads us to leap to conclusions about who other people are.

My radar, after all these years of sanity, is still off when it comes to what people do or don't mean.

fame is merely the fact of being misunderstood by millions of people.

One of the reasons people might be fallible, why we might fail to do what we try to do isignorance, that we have a limited understanding of the laws of the world - the physical laws that govern the world and of all the particulars of the world upon which those laws work. And then there's ineptitude, meaning that the knowledge is available, but individuals fail to apply it correctly. The third source is "necessary fallibility." That is, we're never going to be omniscient, there is some knowledge that we will simply never achieve, and there are limits to what we will be able to do.

I made a mistake. That happens. It proves I'm human, which you know, for some people, is a revelation.

It reveals that people are confusing." Rovender corrected her. "Not Confusing. Complex.

Discover how little you know about the people you know.

You'd be surprised how much you don't understand what other people see your actions as; how other people view the things you say and the things that you do. And a lot of times just clarifying what your intentions are with people makes a huge difference.

You can learn technological things, you can learn about specific things, but the real problems that people deal with in any subject, existential subjects or romantic subjects, you never learn anything. So you make a fool of yourself when you're 20, you make a fool of yourself at 40, at 60 at 80. The ancient Greeks were dealing with these problems. They screwed up all the time. People do now.

Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.

The worst-tempered people I've ever met were people who knew they were wrong.

We must accept human error as inevitable - and design around that fact.

The young specialist in English Lit, ...lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong.

People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them.

Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.

That is life. Just one long succession of misunderstandings and rash acts and what not. Absolutely.

When people talk to me about the weather, I always feel they mean something else.

People--stupid when they lived; potentially stupid when they died.

The greatest pleasure is not - say - sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity - well, that's the job of the writer.

Graeme Smith is capable of reading other people's heads.

It's hard to get along with people. As much as you try to like them and accept them as individuals, it becomes difficult because they keep getting out of line and wasting your time.

The bottom line in all of it is that, in life, it's all about people.