Philip Roth Quotes

I'm not sure there are too many people who write what I write.

I think all writers have a style, a particular voice and rhythm that you have to find.

The most important thing when starting out with essay writing is to find a voice with which you're comfortable. You need to find a persona that is very much like you, but slightly caricatured.

As far as what I do, my value as a writer is certainly not to try to recapitulate a 19th century form. Certain styles of narrative don't conform to my style of experiencing the world.

When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you.

I wish I could think of a suitable name for the kind of writing I do.

I don't have a style. I just try to write what the story demands.

Every writer must find a way of writing that tells the reader: This is me and no one else. The Voice can be idiosyncratic, but it cannot be obscure. It is a blend of style and content and intent and rhythm and pure personality.

The elegance and the quality - the talent is always in the literature. I start with the word and I base everything on that. It doesn't make any difference to me.

Ignore all advice about writing. Leave your blood on every page. Every page!

I was one of those kids who always wrote.

When I'm writing, I try to have the mask of my character on as I'm walking through the world.

Occasionally people ask me how it is I write different types of things, and my answer to that is it's very natural. You get bored writing one kind of thing all the time.

Now I'm not an author, I'm a writer, that's all I am.

I think the only way you can become a writer is through honing your voice, creating your own voice.

How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

I've always thought of writing as sort of active communication.

I've been writing since I was very young, even before I was a teenager. As far as I'm concerned, I am a writer - whether my writing's spoken or written in a blog, paper, book or printed on the side of a submarine.

I can still put down some pretty nasty stuff on paper, which is what I enjoy doing.

Like, even when I speak, I think I speak the same way I write. I kind of see it a certain way, and it leads me to write it exactly how I'm seeing it.

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

It took many years to accept that fantasy is the fuel for my storytelling passion, and without that, I really am a hack, writing for money or approval rather than for the pure delight of storytelling.

I'm not a fan - this is a personal preference - I'm not a fan of tour-de-force writing. I admire it, but it's not where my inclination is. I want to hide.

I still write the same way and have the same perspective.