Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.
Philip RothWhen I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on. Then, especially with the help of the computer, rewriting is so easy to do with the computer, much easier than it used to be with the typewriter. So the books go through numerous drafts.
Philip RothA Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!
Philip RothHe is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artistโs success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himselfโฆ Freudโฆ studied his own dreams not because he was a โnarcissist,โ but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?
Philip RothThe secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate.
Philip Roth