Philip Roth Quotes

A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

A book, while it is being written, has an intense life of its own which you share.

For me, reading books and writing them are tied together. The words of other writers teach me and refresh me and inspire me.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.

A writer is like a bag lady going through life with a sack and a pointed stick collecting stuff.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

It's funny - for a long time, I didn't know I was writing a book. I was writing stories. For me, each story took so long and took so much out of me, that when I finished it, I was like, Oh my gosh, I feel like I've poured everything from myself into this, and then I'd get depressed for a week. And then once I was ready to write a new story, I would want to write about something that was completely different, so I would search for a totally different character with a different set of circumstances.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

For me, life is writing and I can do it anywhere. It doesn't matter where I am. I listen. I write. I live.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

I love writing. It's one of my favorite jobs. Of the things I get to do, I love sitting in a room and coming up with ideas, and I love going home and pounding them out.

I sometimes don't know what I'm writing when I start writing it, on some level.

Writing is never, ever easy but I wake up every morning grateful for the gift of being able to do this.

I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

If you want to be a writer, just write. There's no magic to it.

I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'