Quotes from Philip Roth

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

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.

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.

The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

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

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.

I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care.

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.

You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.

I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter that means you had a hard time during the Bush years.

Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.

I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As I see it, my focus has never been on masculine power rampant and triumphant but rather on the antithesis: masculine power impaired.

There's something every woman wants, and that's a man to blame.

I'm not angry; I write about angry characters. When I'm doing that, I'm happy. Just like when I'm writing about Mickey Sabbath being lustful, I'm not feeling lustful; I'm happy.

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.

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?