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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

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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
Used
Stamina
Wells
Humiliation
Mention
Well
Frustration
Writing
Daily
Going
Endure
Longer
Write

More quotes by Philip Roth

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It's amazing how much punishment we can take.
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Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.
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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.
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When I was a child... I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'
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Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline.
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My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets — no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!
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The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
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The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy ? that is every man?s tragedy.
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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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I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface
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The signore...wishes her to begin at the beginning.
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I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.
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Being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.
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The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open.
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A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!
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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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Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind.
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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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To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.
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