Philip Roth Quotes

I just write the books that I think I would want to read.

I write characters and stories that move me, and I write from the heart.

There are millions of people who think that romance isn't real writing. But the only person who can make you real, make your books real, is you.

In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story.

My writing is authentic, and whatever happens in my life is what I write about.

All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.

I prefer writing originals.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

The cool thing about being a songwriter, or a writer, I guess, in general, you can take on a lot of different things, experience a lot of different things, just by writing about them.

When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.

In every novel, I write about something - a place, an experience, an emotion - with which I'm intimately familiar, but it's also crucial to me that I take on challenges. If write only inside my comfort zone, I'll suffocate.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

I did no research on 'The Best Man.' That was something that came out from my own head.

I believed, after writing 'Mrs. Kimble,' that I knew how to write a novel. I quickly discovered that I only knew how to write that novel. 'Baker Towers' was a different beast entirely; and I felt as though I had to learn to write all over again.

When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.

The wonderful thing about being a writer is that everything that happens is grist to the mill.

I tried to reject everything I knew as a TV writer when I decided to be a novelist, and the books didn't work. Finally I realized I should go back to all the techniques I'd learned.

Literature for me isn't a workaday job, but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy.

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.

Why my interest in writers? Well, I'm one, and many of my friends are writers. I know what it's like to write. I'm interested in the creative process. I'm fascinated by the disparity between who we are on the outside, and what we have bubbling away inside us.

When I started writing 'A Million Little Pieces,' I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.

I'm a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was, and that would have come out even if I didn't want it.

When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.

Many people have told me that my books read like novels. Perhaps this is because, when I write, I feel I am really there, so strong is my feeling for my subject. On occasion, I have been so moved by the events I have been describing that I have felt like crying.

'Hill St.' was very good, but it was very impersonal work for me. I wrote about that place as if I was a visitor. It wasn't what my life was like. It was a great place to learn the craft of how to shape a scene, but I wanted a chance to write about more personal themes and obsessions.