8 Philip Roth Quotes on Writing

Philip Roth quotes on writing

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

4. This indictment is a kind of fever that flares up from time to time. It flared up after 'Defender of the Faith,' again after 'Goodbye Columbus,' and understandably it went way up - to about 107 - after 'Portnoy's Complaint.' Now there's just a low-grade fever running, nothing to worry about.

5. 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.

6. 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.

20. I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they're actually trying to find out, 'Is he as crazy as I am?' I don't need that question answered.

22. 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. This isn't to say I wished to change places. I didn't envy their persecution and the way in which it heightens their social importance. I didn't even envy them their seemingly more valuable and serious themes. The trivialization, in the West, of much that's deadly serious in the East is itself a subject, one requiring considerable imaginative ingenuity to transform into compelling fiction.

25. Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.

27. It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.