Philip Roth Quotes
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For all I know, I am beginning with the ending. My page one can wind up a year later as page two hundred, if it's still even around.
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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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As for the kind of writer I am? I am who I don't pretend to be.
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When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it will be a great place.
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I don't know any writer for whom it comes easily. Maybe John Updike - a story would just seem to come to him whole, you know, out of a personal experience. But the rest of us, I think, are not so lucky, and I had to work hard, yeah.
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If I don't measure up as an American writer, at least leave me to my delusion.
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You write differently in each book. It may appear to be similar to readers, but you're a different writer in each book because you haven't approached that subject before. And every subject brings out a different prose strain in you. Fundamentally, yes, you're contained as one writer. But you have various voices. Like a good actor.
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I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.
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...and then this amazing creature -to whom no one has ever said 'Shah!' or 'I only hope your children will do the same to you someday!'
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A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.
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At night, I read. I read for two hours. I just finished a marvelous book by Louise Erdrich, 'The Round House.' But mostly I read 20th-century history and biography. I lived then. I was either a child or at school or at work.
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Let me tell you about the nap. It's absolutely fantastic. When I was a kid, my father was always trying to tell me how to be a man. And he said - I was maybe nine - he said, 'Philip, whenever you take a nap, take your clothes off and put a blanket over you, and you're going to sleep better.' Well, as with everything, he was right.
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My goal would be to find a big, fat subject that would occupy me to the end of my life, and when I finish it, I'll die. What's agony is starting; I hate starting them. I just want to keep writing now and end when it ends.
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Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
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I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter, that means you had a hard time during the Bush years.
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As I see it, my focus has never been on masculine power rampant and triumphant but rather on the antithesis: masculine power impaired.
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I rarely, if ever, had another book in mind while I was writing the previous book. Each book starts from ashes, really.
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And he couldn't do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.
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I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.
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To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel, really.
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A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!
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When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
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Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.
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This indictment is a kind of fever that flares up from time to time. It flared up after 'Defender of the Faith,' again after 'Goodbye Columbus,' and understandably it went way up - to about 107 - after 'Portnoy's Complaint.' Now there's just a low-grade fever running, nothing to worry about.