-
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.
Philip Roth -
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.
Philip Roth
-
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.
Philip Roth -
I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter, that means you had a hard time during the Bush years.
Philip Roth -
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.
Philip Roth -
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.
Philip Roth -
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.
Philip Roth -
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.
Philip Roth
-
...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!'
Philip Roth -
I rarely, if ever, had another book in mind while I was writing the previous book. Each book starts from ashes, really.
Philip Roth -
I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.
Philip Roth -
If I don't measure up as an American writer, at least leave me to my delusion.
Philip Roth -
When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it will be a great place.
Philip Roth -
It was my great problem to solve: how to write a book, you know. And after you write one, you have to write another to prove to yourself you can do it again.
Philip Roth
-
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.
Philip Roth -
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.
Philip Roth -
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.
Philip Roth -
They the young are not 'no-longers,' losing faculties, losing control, shamefully dispossessed from themselves, marked by deprivation and experiencing the organic rebellion staged by the body against the elderly; they are 'not-yets,' with no idea how quickly things turn out another way.
Philip Roth -
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.
Philip Roth -
When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
Philip Roth
-
Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend.
Philip Roth -
With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two years your life stopped. If you had been running in the direction of your life, you had to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain boring.
Philip Roth -
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.
Philip Roth -
As for the kind of writer I am? I am who I don't pretend to be.
Philip Roth