American - Novelist | March 19, 1933 - May 22, 2018
Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.
Philip Roth
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Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.
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Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
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