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" 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. "

Philip Roth

Doing

Feeling

Writing

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

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

" 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. "

" You write differently in each book. It may appear to be similar to readers, but you're a different writer in each book because you haven't approached that subject before. And every subject brings out a different prose strain in you. Fundamentally, yes, you're contained as one writer. But you have various voices. Like a good actor. "

Philip Roth

You

Book

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

" 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. "

" Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding? "

" As for the kind of writer I am? I am who I don't pretend to be. "

Philip Roth

Pretend

I Am

" 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. "

Philip Roth

Happening

" Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts. "

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

Philip Roth

Just

Dying

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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

" Nothing keeps its promise. "

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

" 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. "

" People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun. "

" Should you protect profits? Yes. But run for the hills? No. "

" 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. "

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