Philip Roth Quotes

I say that I can't make anything up. I think of myself as a collage artist. I'm cutting and pasting memories of my life. And I say, I have to live a life in order to tell a life. I would prefer to tell it because telling you're always in control, you're like God.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

I'm writing my biography. It's my business. This is what happened in my life, and I'm writing about it.

Others are writing my biography, and let it rest as they elect to make it. I have lived my life, well and ill, always less well than I wanted it to be but it is, as it is, and as it has been; so small a thing, to have had so much about it!

I am planning my one woman show. It will be a showcase of my life. It starts at the beginning and ends where I am today. It will have every single inch of my life - as much as you can get into an hour. I will be touring everywhere.

The history of my life must begin by the earliest circumstance which my memory can evoke; it will therefore commence when I had attained the age of eight years and four months.

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, 'Why don't you write your autobiography?'

A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person's life and gives an account of it.

Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.

There's nothing more interesting than the details of someone's life.

An autobiography is a life story. It starts when you're born and continues until the end.

Recounting their histories, people often sound like interested bystanders to their own lives.

I would never write a memoir, because it would be too boring.

There is properly no history; only biography.

By calling it a memoir, I meant is as a collection of memories. I thought it was (a more) artful (title) than documentary.

I've had three biographies made about my life so people know an awful lot about me.

Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.

Biography is the best form of history.

I live my memoirs, I don’t have to write them down.

An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

There will be some trouble about 'biography' because I have never troubled myself to supply particulars of my early life to any writer.

The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future.

Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies.

Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.

Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.