Philip Roth (1933–2018,) fully Philip Milton Roth, was an American novelist and short-story writer. He used his Jewish background and his college days for the source of many of his novels and other works.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, he attended Bucknell University and Chicago University. His upbringing was Jewish conservative and lower middle-class. An uncompromising, tough-minded writer, he recurrently annoyed Jewish organizations with his portrayal of Jews as proficient at scheming and compromise; his writings on sexual matters created conflict with conservatives, who restricted access to his books.
Roth launched his standing with the short-story collection Goodbye Columbus (1959.) His best-known novel is Portnoy’s Complaint (1969.) Other works include Zuckerman Bound (1985,) Operation Shylock (1993,) Sabbath’s Theater (1995,) and American Pastoral (1997, Pulitzer Prize.)
In Roth’s later years, his works such as Everyman (2006) were informed by a progressively unadorned obsession with mortality and with the failure of the aging body and mind. Indignation (2008; film 2016) is narrated from the afterlife by a man who died at age 19. The Humbling (2009; film 2014) depicts an aging actor who realizes that he has lost his talent and is not capable to work. A polio epidemic is at the focus of Nemesis (2010,) set in his hometown in 1944.
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I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.
—Philip Roth
Topics: Writing, Autobiography
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!
—Philip Roth
Topics: Words, Language
A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.
—Philip Roth
Topics: Religion, Jews, Judaism
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.
—Philip Roth
Topics: Autobiography
If there’s anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it’s self-questioning coming too late.
—Philip Roth
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.
—Philip Roth
Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.
—Philip Roth
Topics: Death, Dying
When you publish a book, it’s the world’s book. The world edits it.
—Philip Roth
Topics: Books, Publishing, Publishers
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
Topics: Judgment
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