Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends. Philip Roth More Quotes by Philip Roth More Quotes From Philip Roth This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you. Philip Roth crime hate knows 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 take-time my-way writing Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it. Philip Roth mess literature 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 roles suicide writing A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die! Philip Roth men boys years 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. Philip Roth childhood memories boys 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! Philip Roth doctors dream needs 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. Philip Roth maps toes body 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. Philip Roth sleep father kids 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. Philip Roth stories history ideas Each book starts from ashes. Philip Roth ashes writing book The question to ask about the writer isn't 'Why does he behave so badly?' but 'What does he gain by wearing this mask? Philip Roth mask gains doe Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown. Philip Roth knowing believe knowledge It's the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge. Philip Roth questions-and-answers littles men When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it. Philip Roth publish book world I don't wish to be a slave any longer to the stringent exigencies of literature. Philip Roth slave literature wish Many of the Kiwis appearing in powerful business circles around the world come from accounting backgrounds. Yet often people have preset ideas of how an accountant walks, talks, smells - although not in the business community. For me it is a career that offers a lot of variety and challenges and I love it. Philip Roth circles careers powerful 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 frustration used writing The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy ? that is every man?s tragedy. Philip Roth unhappiness tragedy men 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. Philip Roth player identity self
