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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Philip Roth Quotes

As for the kind of writer I am? I am who I don’t pretend to be.

– Philip Roth

A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.

– Philip Roth

History… is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

– 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

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

– Philip Roth

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.

– Philip Roth

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.

– 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

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!

– 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

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.

– 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

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

– Philip Roth

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.

– Philip Roth

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

– Philip Roth

The novelist’s obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word.

– Philip Roth

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.

– Philip Roth

My traducers propound my alleged malefaction as though I have spewed venom on women for half a century. But only a madman would go to the trouble of writing 31 books in order to affirm his hatred.

– Philip Roth

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.

– Philip Roth

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

– Philip Roth

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

– Philip Roth

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

– 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

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

– Philip Roth

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.

– Philip Roth

For me, the passing of time has provided me with subjects I never had before. Subjects I can now look at from a historical perspective. Like the anti-communist era in America. I lived through that. I was a boy; I didn’t find a way to write about it until many years later. The same with the Vietnam War.

– Philip Roth

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.

– Philip Roth

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.

– Philip Roth

Nothing keeps its promise.

– 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

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