Best quotes by Philip Roth on Life

Checkout quotes by Philip Roth on Life

• ‟ Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.

  - Philip Roth
  

• ‟ That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.

  - Philip Roth
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two years your life stopped. If you had been running in the direction of your life, you had to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain boring.

  - Philip Roth
  

• ‟ I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

  - Philip Roth
  

• ‟ Writing, for me, was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life.

  - Philip Roth
  

• ‟ Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life.

  - Philip Roth
  

• ‟ Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life.

  - Philip Roth
  

• ‟ My goal would be to find a big, fat subject that would occupy me to the end of my life, and when I finish it, I'll die. What's agony is starting; I hate starting them. I just want to keep writing now and end when it ends.

  - Philip Roth