#224

“Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance – the tyranny of contingency – is everything” (Roth, 2010: 242-243).

ROTH, Philip (2010). Nemesis. London: Jonathan Cape.

#207

“Don't you see, it isn't that women mean too little to me – what's caused the trouble is that they mean so much” (id, 245).

#206

“Now I am sure that many of the young women (...) who set themselves up as specialists in loving hadn't a very clear idea of how strong a charge their emotions got from the instinct of survival – or how much those emotions arose out of the yearning to own and be owned rather than from a reservoir of pure and selfless love that was the special property of themselves and their gender. After all, how lovable are men? Particularly men “unable to love”? No, there was more to all that talk about “permanent relationships” than many young women (and their chosen mates) were able to talk about or able at that time fully to understand: the more was the fact of female dependence, defenselessness, and vulnerability” (id, 171).

#205

“I'm yours. I'll do anything. Come and go as you like. Let me feed you. let me sit with you at night and watch you read. You can do anything you want to my body. I'll do anything you say. Just have dinner with me sometimes and use some of these things. And I'll never utter a peep. I'll be good as gold. I won't ask what you do when you go away. You don't don't have to take me anywhere. Just stay here sometimes and make use of whatever you want, including me. You see, I have these thick bath-sized towels and Belgian lace tablecloths, all this lovely crockery, three bathrooms, two televisions, and two million dollars (...), I have these breasts and this vagina, these limbs, this skin – and no life” (Roth, 1993: 153).

ROTH, Philip (1993). My Life As A Man. Vintage: New York.

#200

“By now the passion between us is no longer quite what it was on those Sundays when we would cling together in my bed until three in the afternoon – “the primrose path to madness”, as Claire once described those rapacious exertions which end finally with the two of us rising on the legs of weary travelers to change the bed linens, to stand embracing beneath the shower, and then go out of doors to get some air before the winter sun goes down” (Roth, 2000: 198).

ROTH, Philip (2000). Professor Of Desire. London: Vintage.

#162

“It's the price of being a writer. One is dogged by the past – pain, sensations, rejections, all of it. I believe that this clinging to the past is a zealous, albeit hopeless, desire to reinvent it so that one could change it. Doctors, lawyers, and many other stable citizens are not afflicted by a persistent memory. In their way, they might be just as disturbed as you or I, except that they don't know it. They don't delve” (id, 103).

#161

“The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties” (id, 100).

#160

“I have never written about things as they happened. All my works are indeed chapters from my most personal experience, but nevertheless they are not “the story of my life.” The things that happened to me in my life have already happened, they are already formed, and time has kneaded them and give them shape. To write things as they happened means to enslave oneself to memory, which is only a minor element in the creative process. To my mind, to create means to order, sort out, and choose the words and pace that fit the work. The materials are indeed materials from one's life, but ultimately the creation is an independent creature” (Roth, 2002: 27).

ROTH, Philip (2002). Shop Talk. London: Vintage.

#138

“I recognize that I'm using the word “facts” here, in this letter, in its idealized form and in a much more simpleminded way than it's meant in the title. Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts” (Roth, 2007: 8).

ROTH, Philip (2007). The Facts. A Novelist's Autobiography. London: Vintage Books.

The Inventive Misread

“To be misread in anyway that bears thinking about, however, a writer has to be read as well. But those misreadings, conferred by skillful, cultivated, highly imaginative, widely read misreaders can be instructive, even when quite bizarre – witness Lawrence on American literature; or Freud, the all-time most influential misreader if imaginative literature. So are those misreaders the censors influential, though for other reasons. And are the Soviet censors necessarily misreading, in Solzhenitzyn's fiction, his political aims? Though censors may appear to be the most narrow-minded and perverse of all misreaders, at times they may be more discerning about the socially injurious implications of a book then the most tolerantly open-minded audience” (id, 151).

#110

“It occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters” (id, 145).

#109

“Actually I think of pornography more as the projection of an altogether human preoccupation with the genitalia in and of themselves – a preoccupation excluding all emotions other than those elemental feelings that the contemplation of genital functions arouses” (Roth, 2007: 6).

ROTH, Philip (2007). Reading Myself And Others. London: Vintage.

#66

“I was never 'strong'. Only determined. One foot in front of the other. Punctuality. Honesty. Courtesy” (Roth, 2006: 22).