I rarely, if ever, had another book in mind while I was writing the previous book. Each book starts from ashes, really. Philip Roth Read Quote
I do the same kind of rewriting that I do in the shorts that I do in long books – and that is a lot. The book really comes to life in the rewriting. Philip Roth Read Quote
I’m an Obama supporter. And if you’re an Obama supporter, that means you had a hard time during the Bush years. Philip Roth Read Quote
Of course you bank on your experience, but as a sounding board. It isn’t that you write down what happens to you every day. You wouldn’t be a writer if you did that. Philip Roth Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life. Philip Roth Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
