Philip Roth Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

  Philip Roth

  Work, Writing, Sisterhood

  1979 In the NewYorkTimes Book Review,15 Jul.

• I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

  Philip Roth

  Lying, Writing, Thinking

  "The Ghost Writer". Book by Philip Roth, 1979.

• I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.

  Philip Roth

  Writing, Commitment, Use

  "Philip Roth Goes Home Again" by Scott Raab, www.esquire.com. October 7, 2010.

• I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.

  Philip Roth

  Writing, Alive, Pages

  Philip Roth, George John Searles (1992). “Conversations with Philip Roth”, p.163, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life.

  Philip Roth

  Morning, Jobs, Real

• Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.

  Philip Roth

  Writing, Judging

  "Philip Roth Goes Home Again" by Scott Raab, www.esquire.com. May 23, 2018.

• 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.

  Philip Roth

  Smart, Writing, Fiction

  FaceBook post by Philip Roth from Aug 17, 2014

• You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.

  Philip Roth

  Writing, Reality, America

  "Military Secrets" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. November 26, 2012.

• Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.

  Philip Roth

  Writing, Wrecks, May

  FaceBook post by Philip Roth from Aug 06, 2011

• A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

  Philip Roth

  Book, Writing, Adventure

  Philip Roth, Ross Miller (2008). “Novels & other narratives, 1986-1991”

• What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel.

  Philip Roth

  Writing, Mind, Acorns

• I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again.

  Philip Roth

  Writing, Looks, Turns

  FaceBook post by Philip Roth from Aug 27, 2012

• Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!

  Philip Roth

  Art, Grief, Writing

  Philip Roth (1998). “I Married a Communist”, p.230, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged -- where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.

  Philip Roth

  Suicide, Writing, Roles

• What I would really love to happen to me would be if I came upon an idea that would keep me busy until I die so I wouldn't have to go through the business of thinking up a new book. But I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.

  Philip Roth

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

• Each book starts from ashes.

  Philip Roth

  Book, Writing, Ashes

  "Philip Roth Unbound". Interview with Tina Brown, www.thedailybeast.com. October 30, 2009.

• I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on. But 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. And then eventually something happens. I don't know. If I knew how it happened I would repeat the process, but I don't know - something just occurs to me.

  Philip Roth

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

• Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed.

  Philip Roth

  Writing, Years, President

  Philip Roth, George John Searles (1992). “Conversations with Philip Roth”, p.178, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.

  Philip Roth

  Book, Writing, Long

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

• When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years – whether it is being the writer or being the lover – turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.

  Philip Roth

  Jobs, Writing, Years

• Eventually the writing takes time. What I want to do is get the story down and I want to know what happens as I write my way into the knowledge of the story.

  Philip Roth

  Writing, Take Time, My Way

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

• I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. 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.

  Philip Roth

  Writing, Desire, Fiction

  "'The Novelist's Obsession Is With Language': Philip Roth on Writing, the Future of Language and the Ghost Writer". Interview with Cynthia Haven, news.stanford.edu. February 03, 2014.

• I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.

  Philip Roth

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

• I know I'm not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation.

  Philip Roth

  Writing, Frustration, Used

• Each book starts from ashes really. I don't feel that I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell or that story to tell, but I want to be occupied with the writing process while I'm living.

  Philip Roth

  Book, Writing, Ashes

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

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