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All Quotes by author - 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! "
Will
Parents
Boy
" 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. "
Glass
Temple
Apple
" All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. "
Knowing
More
Astonishing
" As for the kind of writer I am? I am who I don't pretend to be. "
Pretend
I Am
Am
" As I see it, my focus has never been on masculine power rampant and triumphant but rather on the antithesis: masculine power impaired. "
See
Power
Never
" 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 either a child or at school or at work. "
School
Book
Work
" A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons. "
Driven
Writer
Help
" 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. "
Up
Fear
Much
" Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on. "
Happening
Go
Me
" 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. "
I Am
Beginning
Ending
" 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. "
Time
Boy
Perspective
" History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. "
Awake
History
I Am
" 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. "
Writer
Live
You
" I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care. "
About
Work
Ask
" I don't know any writer for whom it comes easily. Maybe John Updike - a story would just seem to come to him whole, you know, out of a personal experience. But the rest of us, I think, are not so lucky, and I had to work hard, yeah. "
Think
Work
Work Hard
" 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. "
Books
Book
Same
" If I don't measure up as an American writer, at least leave me to my delusion. "
Leave
American
Delusion
" 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. "
Desire
Done
I Am
" I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter, that means you had a hard time during the Bush years. "
Hard
Had
Years
" I'm not angry; I write about angry characters. When I'm doing that, I'm happy. Just like when I'm writing about Mickey Sabbath being lustful, I'm not feeling lustful; I'm happy. "
Doing
Feeling
Writing
" I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here. "
American
Finding
Future
" 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 water of fiction. But I've got to begin in life so I can pump life into it throughout. "
My Life
Down
Feet
" I rarely, if ever, had another book in mind while I was writing the previous book. Each book starts from ashes, really. "
Ashes
Really
Mind
" I said the screen will kill the reader, and it has: the movie screen in the beginning, the television screen, and now the coup de grace, the computer screen. "
Grace
Said
Television
" Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding? "
Human
Misunderstanding
Intelligent
" 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 to be occupied with the writing process while I'm living. "
Know
Writing
Work
" It was my great problem to solve: how to write a book, you know. And after you write one, you have to write another to prove to yourself you can do it again. "
Yourself
You Can Do It
Great
" 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. "
History
Reading
Interest
" 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. "
Every Day
End
Day
" 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. "
Autobiography
Decide
Write
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