Philip Roth
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 March 1933
CountryUnited States of America
book years pages
I work most days and if you work most days and you get at least a page done a day, then at the end of the year you have 365. So the pages accumulate and then I publish the books.
book rewriting
The book really comes to life in the rewriting.
book writing thinking
I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.
fall want setting
You don't want to repeat yourself for one. You don't want to fall into the clichés for another. And you don't want to be licentious really. You want to be descriptive, if you can be. And you're not setting out to arouse anybody.
reading two focus
To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.
book thinking television
The book can't compete with the screen. It couldn't compete beginning with the movie screen. It couldn't compete with the television screen and it can't compete with the computer screen I don't think. And now we have all those screens so against all those screens I think the book can't measure up.
book writing stories
Each book starts from ashes really. I don't feel that I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell or that story to tell, but I want to be occupied with the writing process while I'm living.
mean hard-times obama-supporters
I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter that means you had a hard time during the Bush years.
book writing thinking
What I would really love to happen to me would be if I came upon an idea that would keep me busy until I die so I wouldn't have to go through the business of thinking up a new book. But I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.
home numbers america
As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn't touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing.
knowing entering
He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.
trouble
How Far back must we go to discover the beginning of trouble?
suicide writing roles
Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged -- where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.
thinking awful exhibitionism
You go to someone and you think, 'I'll tell him this.' But why? The impulse is that the telling is going to relieve you. And that's why you feel awful later--you've relieved yourself, and if it truly is tragic and awful, it's not better, it's worse---the exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse.