Literary Birthday – 19 March – Philip Roth

Philip Roth was born on 19 March 1933 and died on 22 May 2018.

Philip Roth Quotes

1. Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.
2. Writing turns you into somebody who’s always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on.
3. The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
4. Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.
5. A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.
6. 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.
7. Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.
8. When you publish a book, it’s the world’s book. The world edits it.
9. Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.
10. Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.
11. 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.
12. I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again…

Read: Philip Roth’s Writing Process

Philip Roth was one of the most awarded American writers of his generation. He penned both novels and short stories. His books twice received the National Book Award, twice the National Book Critics Circle award, and three times the PEN/Faulkner Award. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral. Harold Bloom named him one of the four greatest American novelists of his day, along with Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.  According to Wikipedia: ‘Roth’s fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its “sensual, ingenious style” and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity.’ His other works include Portnoy’s Complaint, The Plot Against America, and The Human Stain. President Barack Obama awarded Roth the 2010 National Humanities Medal.

Source for image Credit: Gotfryd, Bernard, photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Philip_Roth,_Author_2020732799_3x4.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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