Philip Roth
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 March 1933
CountryUnited States of America
jobs father ambition
a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.
jobs writing years
When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years – whether it is being the writer or being the lover – turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.
morning jobs real
Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. 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.
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
depict observed reckless seemed talked trying
It seemed pretty reckless and vicious. I was just trying to depict the way it was, the way it sounded, what they talked about. This was just what I observed or imagined.
admission books books-and-reading
It's an admission of the books into perpetuity.
activity domination fact fall funds investment microsoft sign stock symptom traders
The fact that a stock like Microsoft could fall so much is a sign that there is very little investment activity in the market. It is a symptom of the domination of traders and hedge funds in the market.