Philip Roth Quotes

The most important lesson my parents taught me is that writing is a job, one that requires discipline and commitment. Most of the time it's a fun job, a wonderful job, but sometimes it isn't, and those are the days that test you.

It's always nice to have people love the things that you do. But it's a lot of hard work, and people are always passionate, if it's family fare or a drama, it's the same amount of work and people invest everything into that, and when it doesn't come out the way you want it to, of course it's hurtful.

Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years.

I stay glued to my piano and my work. I don't look up. I write, I produce, I do the next project, I do my job. I don't look up, and I try to be kind. I try to be kind to people. That's what I do.

That's the interesting thing about writing. You can start late, you can be ignorant of things, and yet, if you work hard and pay attention you can do a good job of it.

I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling?

The strange thing about writing is that it's so easy to write a novel. It is really easy. But it's getting there to the point where it's easy that's hard. The hard part is to get there.

Even after you've won fame and fortune, every time you write you've got to write, there's no shortcut, you have to start your career all over again.

There is very little that is accidental in my work. I believe in serendipity for developments of plot, but the actual writing is arrived at by very hard work. The joy of writing doesn't mean that you don't get the backaches and headaches and the days when it's not coming.

You may be able to write a novel, you may not. You will never know until you have worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never really know until you have written the whole of it and submitted it for publication.

Start early and work hard. A writer's apprenticeship usually involves writing a million words (which are then discarded) before he's almost ready to begin. That takes a while.

It took me 10 years to write a story that pleased me - that I could look at after it was published and not cringe.

writing is the loneliest job in the world. There's always that frustrating chasm to bridge between the concept and the writing of it. We're a harassed tribe, we writers.

To be a writer is to sit down at one's desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone - just plain going at it, in pain and delight. To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over...

Writing is like wrestling; you are wrestling with ideas and with the story. There is a lot of energy required. At the same time, it is exciting. So it is both difficult and easy. What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing. I have said in the kind of exaggerated manner of writers and prophets that writing, for me, is like receiving a term of imprisonment-you know that's what you're in for, for whatever time it takes.

Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.

You won't make a living writing until you learn to write when you don't want to.

There's a danger in romanticizing what it means to be a writer. Because what it really means is hard, hard work. It means tearing your hair out. Feeling like your head is about to explode.

For a writer, children make life needlessly hard. I've muddled through a lot of things, but I have not muddled through my writing life. I work absolutely flat out, giving it my all.

Every play I do, every book I write, every painting I paint, I will struggle with. I don't know what it's like for a project to come easy.

Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul, thus have I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.

I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.

We put everything we had into this record, just like we do with every other record that we make.

When I'm in the midst of finishing a book, I can be working around the clock.

When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don't mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It's the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.