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

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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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A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!
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There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed.
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Too late, but I understand. That we don't perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that -- of just that.
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The question to ask about the writer isn't 'Why does he behave so badly?' but 'What does he gain by wearing this mask?
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Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.
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The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.
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Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?
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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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I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.
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The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions.
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--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others
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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.
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I do not say correct or savory. I do not say seemly or even natural. I say serious. Sensationally serious. Unspeakably serious. Solemnly, recklessly, blissfully serious.
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The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy ? that is every man?s tragedy.
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Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid
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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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I think you're a wonder. You're beautiful. You're mature. You are, I admit, vastly more experienced than I am. That's what threw me. I was thrown. Forgive me.
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'Haunted by the past' is a commonplace phrase because it's a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, 'haunted', the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become.
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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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