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" 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. "

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

Philip Roth

See

Power

Never

" 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

" To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel, really. "

Philip Roth

Two

Devotion

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war. "

" 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. "

" Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre. "

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time. "

" 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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter, that means you had a hard time during the Bush years. "

" A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons. "

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

Philip Roth

Pretend

I Am

" 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. "

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

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

Philip Roth

Knowing

Astonishing