Quote

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.

Philip Roth

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Philip Roth
Age: 85 †
Born: 1933
Born: March 18
Died: 2018
Died: May 22
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Philip Milton Roth
Writing
Fiction
Mackerel
Mind
Inside
Acorn
Grows
Relinquish
Start
Acorns
Write
Oaks
Ends
Moreover
Reason
Rarely
Ever
Fit

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A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!
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Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.
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There’s no remaking reality... Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There’s no other way.
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As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn't touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing.
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Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.
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One either imposes one's ideas or one is imposed on.
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I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.
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Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.
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You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.
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Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself
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It's best to give while your hand is still warm.
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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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There's something every woman wants, and that's a man to blame.
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I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.
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