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. – Philip Roth
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. – Philip Roth
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. – Philip Roth
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. – Philip Roth
Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline. – Philip Roth
Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding? – Philip Roth
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
Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life. – Philip Roth
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. – Philip Roth
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
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. – Philip Roth
All that we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. – Philip Roth
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. – Philip Roth
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. – Philip Roth