Top 33 Philip Roth Quotes

When you publish a book, it’s the world‘s book. The world edits it.

I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care.

As I see it, my focus has never been on masculine power rampant and triumphant but rather on the antithesis: masculine power impaired.

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.

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.

Writing, for me, was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life.

All that we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

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.

Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline.

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.

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.

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.

I think I write and publish as often as I do because I can’t bear being without a book to work on… I don’t feel I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell, but I know I want to be occupied with the writing process while I’m living.

People are unjust to anger – it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.

I’m an Obama supporter. And if you’re an Obama supporter, that means you had a hard time during the Bush years.

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.

Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life.

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

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.

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.

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.

Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.

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.

I do the same kind of rewriting that I do in the shorts that I do in long books – and that is a lot. The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

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.

Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.

Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.

Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.

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.

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.

Writing is frustration – it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It’s just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.

I’m not good at finding ‘encouraging‘ features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.

If I don’t measure up as an American writer, at least leave me to my delusion.