“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 eithe...”
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Author detail
Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection *Goodbye, Columbus,* which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller *Portnoy's Complaint.* Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history *The Plot Against America.*
Quotes
Showing 21-31 of 31
“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 eithe...”
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“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.”
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“Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.”
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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...”
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“A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.”
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“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.”
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“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...”
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“Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.”
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“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.”
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“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 t...”
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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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