Philip Roth Quotes

We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

We aren't in an information age, we are in an entertainment age.

It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.

We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes--or rather, we've seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are televiewers, telehearers, teleknowers.

To live in society today is like living in one enormous comic-strip.

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.

Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age's vaunted 'communications industry' had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.

The mediated world has approached us from a lot of different directions and we have freely chosen our automobiles and our skyscrapers and our televisions and our telephones and our computers because they have given us power and freedom. Now we are beginning to notice there's a price to pay for them. It's all interconnected, the good stuff and the bad stuff comes together.

I've often noticed" Fiona said, "that when people say, 'This can't happen in this day and age', they say it because it is happening.

We've had the Iron Age, the Stone Age, this is the pissin' about age.

We all exist in a time of widespread exponential growth. We are busier than ever.

The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment. I asked for bread and was given a tranquilliser.

I'm not interested in the TV much. I quit watching the news a couple years ago and my outlook on life has gotten a whole lot better.

If this is the information age, what are we so well-informed about?

Woe to these people who have no appetite for the very dish that their age serves up.

My theory was that a city without a newspaper is a city without a soul.

Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem.

In an automobile civilization, which was one of constant motion and activity, there was almost no time to think; in a television one, there is small desire.

There is no denying that we are suffering from a collective neurosis and the novel which does not face this is not a novel of our time.

He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned.

The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television, a distracting and absorbing medium which seems determined to entertain itself more than it informs and educates.

Tokyo Sonata speaks to us, with feeling and passion, as one of the most eloquent statements on the world today that we are likely to see in this moviegoing year.

We often hear that the digital age has resulted in a devaluing of time, space, and place. But I wonder if theseclaims are exaggerated.