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" 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. "

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" Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life. "

Philip Roth

My Life

Fake

History

" That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader. "

" Of course you bank on your experience, but as a sounding board. It isn't that you write down what happens to you every day. You wouldn't be a writer if you did that. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" As I see it, my focus has never been on masculine power rampant and triumphant but rather on the antithesis: masculine power impaired. "

" If I don't measure up as an American writer, at least leave me to my delusion. "

" When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts. "

" Nothing keeps its promise. "

" Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends. "

" I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here. "

" Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when. "

Philip Roth

Just

Dying

" History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. "

" I rarely, if ever, had another book in mind while I was writing the previous book. Each book starts from ashes, really. "

" The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress. "

" 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. "

" All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. "

Philip Roth

Knowing

Astonishing

" My goal would be to find a big, fat subject that would occupy me to the end of my life, and when I finish it, I'll die. What's agony is starting; I hate starting them. I just want to keep writing now and end when it ends. "

Philip Roth

Hate

Life

" Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive. "

" 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. "

" Let me tell you about the nap. It's absolutely fantastic. When I was a kid, my father was always trying to tell me how to be a man. And he said - I was maybe nine - he said, 'Philip, whenever you take a nap, take your clothes off and put a blanket over you, and you're going to sleep better.' Well, as with everything, he was right. "

Philip Roth

Father

Clothes