Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933) is an American novelist.
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.
I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.
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.
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.
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.
Dreams? If only they had been! But I don't need dreams, Doctor, that's why I hardly have them—because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight!
Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown.
a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.
I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface
The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop.
I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.
The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
The book really comes to life in the rewriting.
You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.
In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees
For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.
I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.
The signore. . . wishes her to begin at the beginning.
For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence.
Turned the wrong way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied in "History", harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.