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I Work Just As Much As I Always Worked. And I Can't Explain The Fact That There Have Been A Series Of Books Coming Rather Regularly Out Of Me. I Work Most Days And If You Work Most Days And You Get At Least A Page Done A Day, Then At The End Of The Year You Have 365. So The Pages Accumulate And Then I Publish The Books.

-Philip Roth

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I Work Just As

Philip Roth

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I Work Just As Much As I Always Worked. And I Can't Explain The Fact That There Have Been A Series Of Books Coming Rather Regularly Out Of Me. I Work Most Days And If You Work Most Days And You Get At Least A Page Done A Day, Then At The End Of The Year You Have 365. So The Pages Accumulate And Then I Publish The Books.

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Never In His Life Had Occasion To Ask Himself, "why Are Things The Way They Are?" Why Should He Bother, When The Way They Were Was Always Perfect? Why Are Things The Way They Are? The Question To Which There Is No Answer, And Up Till Then He Was So Blessed He Didn't Even Know The Question Existed.

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.

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I'm An Obama Supporter. And If You're An Obama Supporter That Means You Had A Hard Time During The Bush Years.

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You Asked If I Thought My Fiction Had Changed Anything In The Culture And The Answer Is No. Sure, There's Been Some Scandal, But People Are Scandalized All The Time; It's A Way Of Life For Them. It Doesn't Mean A Thing. If You Ask If I Want My Fiction To Change Anything In The Culture, The Answer Is Still No. What I Want Is To Possess My Readers While They Are Reading My Book If I Can, To Possess Them In Ways That Other Writers Don't. Then Let Them Return, Just As They Were, To A World Where Everybody Else Is Working To Change, Persuade, Tempt, And Control Them.

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The Ordeal Is Part Of The Commitment" Esquire Interview 10/10

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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.

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Let's Hope The First Comes First.

It Isn't That You Subordinate Your Ideas To The Force Of The Facts In Autobiography But That You Construct A Sequence Of Stories To Bind Up The Facts With A Persuasive Hypothesis That Unravels Your History's Meaning.

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I Think I Write Or Publish As Much As I Do Because I Can Bear Being Without A Book To Work On.

Old Age Isn't A Battle; Old Age Is A Massacre.

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Stop Worrying About Growing Old. And Think About Growing Up.

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A Jew Without Jews, Without Judaism, Without Zionism, Without Jewishness, Without A Temple Or An Army Or Even A Pistol, A Jew Clearly Without A Home, Just The Object Itself, Like A Glass Or An Apple.

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Should You Protect Profits? Yes. But Run For The Hills? No.

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I Am The Raskolnikov Of Jerking Off – The Sticky Evidence Is Everywhere!

People Were Standing Up Everywhere Shouting, "this Is Me! This Is Me!" Every Time You Looked At Them They Stood Up And Told You Who They Were, And The Truth Of It Was That They Had No More Idea Who Or What They Were Than He Had. They Believed Their Flashing Signs, Too. They Ought To Be Standing Up And Shouting, "this Isn't Me! This Isn't Me!" They Would If They Had Any Decency. "this Isn't Me!" Then You Might Know How To Proceed Through The Flashing Bullshit Of This World.

The Secret To Living In The Rush Of The World With A Minimum Of Pain Is To Get As Many People As Possible To String Along With Your Delusions.

Everybody Else Is Working To Change, Persuade, Tempt And Control Them. The Best Readers Come To Fiction To Be Free Of All That Noise.

He Had Learned The Worst Lesson That Life Can Teach - That It Makes No Sense.

Doctor Doctor, What Do You Say, Lets Put The Id Back In Yid

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All That We Don't Know Is Astonishing. Even More Astonishing Is What Passes For Knowing.

A Life Of Writing Books Is A Trying Adventure In Which You Cannot Find Out Where You Are Unless You Lose Your Way.

The Fact Remains That Getting People Right Is Not What Living Is All About Anyway. It's Getting Them Wrong That Is Living, Getting Them Wrong And Wrong And Wrong And Then, On Careful Reconsideration, Getting Them Wrong Again. That's How We Know We're Alive: We're Wrong.

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Teaching ... Particularly In The 1990s, Teaching What Is Far And Away The Dumbest Generation In American History, Is The Same As Walking Up Broadway In Manhattan Talking To Yourself, Except Instead Of Eighteen People Who Hear You In The Street Talking To Yourself, They're All In The Room. They Know, Like, Nothing.

A Jewish Man With His Parents Alive Is Half The Time A Helpless Infant!

Because That Is When You Love Somebody - When You See Them Being Game In The Face Of The Worst. Not Courageous. Not Heroic. Just Game.

Don't Judge It. Just Write It. Don't Judge It. It's Not For You To Judge It.

In My Childhood I Led The Life Of A Sage, When I Grew Up I Started Climbing Trees

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.

Everything Dictated Silence And Self-control But I Couldn't Restrain Myself And Spoke My Mind.

At A Certain Stage Of Misery, You'll Try Anything To Explain What's Going On With You, Even If You Know It Doesn't Explain A Thing And It's One Failed Explanation After Another.

Nothing Lasts And Yet Nothing Passes Either, And Nothing Passes Just Because Nothing Lasts.

When I Have A First Draft, I Have A Floor Under My Feet That I Can Walk On. And Then, Especially With The Help Of The Computer, Rewriting Is So Easy To Do With The Computer, Much Easier Than It Used To Be With The Typewriter. So The Books Go Through Numerous Drafts.

I Was Gushing And I Knew It. I Surprised Myself With My Eagerness To Please, Felt Myself Saying Too Much, Explaining Too Much, Overinvolved And Overexcited In The Way You Are When You're A Kid And You Think You've Found A Soul Mate In The New Boy Down The Street And You Feel Yourself Drawn By The Force Of The Courtship And So Act As You Don't Normally Do And A Lot More Openly Than You May Even Want To.

When The Whole World Doesn't Believe In God, It'll Be A Great Place.

Everyone Becomes A Part Of History Whether They Like It Or Not And Whether They Know It Or Not.

I Don’t Ask Writers About Their Work Habits. I Really Don’t Care. Joyce Carol Oates Says Somewhere That When Writers Ask Each Other What Time They Start Working And When They Finish And How Much Time They Take For Lunch, They’re Actually Trying To Find Out, "is He As Crazy As I Am?" I Don’t Need That Question Answered.

The Terror Of The Unforeseen Is What The Science Of History Hides, Turning A Disaster Into An Epic.

I Wouldn't Mind Writing A Long Book Which Is Going To Occupy Me For The Rest Of My Life.

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.

The Only Way To Have A Funeral Is To Invite Everyone Who Ever Knew The Person And Just Wait For The Accident To Happen-somebody Who Comes In Out Of The Blue And Says The Truth. Everything Else Is Table Manners.

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.

Sheer Playfulness And Deadly Seriousness Are My Closest Friends.

Closest Friends

All I Can Tell You With Certainty Is That I, For One, Have No Self, And That I Am Unwilling Or Unable To Perpetrate Upon Myself The Joke Of A Self. What I Have Instead Is A Variety Of Impersonations I Can Do, And Not Only Of Myself - A Troupe Of Players That I Have Internalised, A Permanent Company Of Actors That I Can Call Upon When A Self Is Required. I Am A Theater And Nothing More Than A Theater.

You Can No More Make Someone Tell The Truth Than You Can Force Someone To Love You.

Telling The Truth

I Work Just As Much As I Always Worked. And I Can't Explain The Fact That There Have Been A Series Of Books Coming Rather Regularly Out Of Me. I Work Most Days And If You Work Most Days And You Get At Least A Page Done A Day, Then At The End Of The Year You Have 365. So The Pages Accumulate And Then I Publish The Books.

Fear Presides Over These Memories, A Perpetual Fear.of Course No Childhood Is Without Its Terrors, Yet I Wonder If I Would Have Been A Less Frightened Boy If Lindbergh Hadn't Been President Or If I Hadn't Been The Offspring Of Jews.

And Since We Don’t Just Forget Things Because They Don’t Matter But Also Forget Things Because They Matter Too Much Because Each Of Us Remembers And Forgets In A Pattern Whose Labyrinthine Windings Are An Identification Mark No Less Distinctive Than A Fingerprintit’s No Wonder That The Shards Of Reality One Person Will Cherish As A Biography Can Seem To Someone Else Who, Say, Happened To Have Eaten Some Ten Thousand Dinners At The Very Same Kitchen Table, To Be A Willful Excursion Into Mythomania

I Don't Wish To Be A Slave Any Longer To The Stringent Exigencies Of Literature.

I Was A Biography In Constant Motion, Memory To The Marrow Of My Bones.

It's Absolutely Fantastic. When I Was A Kid, My Father Was Always Trying To Tell Me How To Be A Man, And He Said To Me, I Was Maybe 9, And He Said To Me, 'philip, Whenever You Take A Nap, Take Your Clothes Off, Put A Blanket On You, And You're Going To Sleep Better.' Well, As With Everything, He Was Right. ... Then The Best Part Of It Is That When You Wake Up, For The First 15 Seconds, You Have No Idea Where You Are. You're Just Alive. That's All You Know. And It's Bliss, It's Absolute Bliss.

I Work Most Days And If You Work Most Days And You Get At Least A Page Done A Day, Then At The End Of The Year You Have 365. So The Pages Accumulate And Then I Publish The Books.

Being In The Dark From Sentence To Sentence Is What Convinces Me To Go On.

The Book Can't Compete With The Screen. It Couldn't Compete Beginning With The Movie Screen. It Couldn't Compete With The Television Screen And It Can't Compete With The Computer Screen I Don't Think. And Now We Have All Those Screens So Against All Those Screens I Think The Book Can't Measure Up.

Unless One Is Inordinately Fond Of Subordination, One Is Always At War.

It's The Little Questions From Women About Tappets That Finally Push Men Over The Edge.

Questions And Answers

You Take Off Your Clothes And You're In Bed With Somebody, And That Is Indeed Where Whatever You've Concealed, Your Particularity, Whatever It May Be, However Encrypted, Is Going To Be Found Out, And That's What All The Shyness Is All About And What Everybody Fears.

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.

Seeing Is Believing And Believing Is Knowing And Knowing Beats Unknowing And The Unknown.

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 Often Have To Write A Hundred Pages Or More Before There's A Paragraph That's Alive.

You Don't Want To Repeat Yourself For One. You Don't Want To Fall Into The Clichés For Another. And You Don't Want To Be Licentious Really. You Want To Be Descriptive, If You Can Be. And You're Not Setting Out To Arouse Anybody.

A Jewish Man With Parents Alive Is A Fifteen-year-old Boy, And Will Remain A Fifteen-year-old Boy Until They Die!

You Have A Conscience, And A Conscience Is A Valuable Attribute, But Not If It Begins To Make You Think You Were To Blame For What Is Far Beyond The Scope Of Your Responsibility.

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Patricia Hewitt

William A. Dembski

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