Philip Roth Quotes
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All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.
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Of course you bank on your experience, but as a sounding board. It isn't that you write down what happens to you every day. You wouldn't be a writer if you did that.
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People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.
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Should you protect profits? Yes. But run for the hills? No.
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Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.
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I'm not angry; I write about angry characters. When I'm doing that, I'm happy. Just like when I'm writing about Mickey Sabbath being lustful, I'm not feeling lustful; I'm happy.
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Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life.
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I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care.
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The novelist's obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word.
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I said the screen will kill the reader, and it has: the movie screen in the beginning, the television screen, and now the coup de grace, the computer screen.
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I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.
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I'm not trying to turn you into a bourgeois, Naomi. If the bed is too luxurious, we can do it on the floor.
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It isn’t that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history’s meaning.
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Oh Patimkin! Fruit grew in their refrigerator and sporting goods dropped from their trees!
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I've stopped reading fiction. I don't read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don't have the same interest in fiction that I once did.
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Nothing keeps its promise.
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Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out? Does anyone find anyone that enchanting unless they have sexual business with them? Who else are you enchanted by? Nobody.
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A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.
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The jealously. That poison. And unprovoked. Jealous even when she tells me she's going ice-skating with her eighteen-year-old brother.
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I work all day, morning and afternoon, just about every day. If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book.
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Routinely, when I finish a book, I think 'What will I do? Where will I get an idea?' And a kind of low-level panic sets in.
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I needed my life as a springboard for my fiction. I have to have something solid under my feet when I write. I'm not a fantasist. I bounce up and down on the diving board, and I go into the water of fiction. But I've got to begin in life so I can pump life into it throughout.
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I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did, and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.
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That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.