Philip Roth
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 March 1933
CountryUnited States of America
experience fiction species
Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.
fiction reader
The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.
writing mind fiction
What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel.
writing desire fiction
I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. 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.
smart writing fiction
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.
reading noise fiction
Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.
touch
I was back in touch with my place,
everybody graduated life plain running stop
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.
history nightmare trying
History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
academy choice expected mix tends unexpected
The Academy tends to like to mix the expected with the unexpected choices,
fun people unjust
People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.
character men envy
American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property--on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.
together twain
Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century,
czech goes matters met occurred society work writer writers
When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters