Philip Roth Quotes
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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.
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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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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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When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it will be a great place.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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 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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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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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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When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
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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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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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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.
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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.