Philip Roth

Son of Herman Roth, whose parents were Jews of Galician descent.

Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, Vol. 132, pp. 323-334. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.

Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for "American Pastoral".

Was awarded the American National Medal of the Arts in 1998 by the National Endowment of the Arts in Washington D.C.

Had taught creative writing and comparative literature at several universities, before he finally retired in 1992.

After earning a degree in English at Bucknell University, he studied at the University of Chicago, receiving an M.A. in English literature.

His first wife Margaret Martinson, who died in 1968, five years after her separation from Roth, is the inspiration for several characters such as Maureen in "My Life as A Man".

Has been a candidate to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for many years.

Former stepfather of opera singer Anna Steiger.

Won the National Book Award twice, in 1960 for "Goodbye, Columbus" and in 1995 for "Sabbaths Theater".

Only reads novels of dead writers such as Franz Kafka or Henry James and non-fiction books.

Owns homes in New Yorks Upper West Side and Connecticut.

Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, Volume 170, pages 349-361. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2008.

He was nominated for the 2008 New Jersey Hall of Fame for his services and contributions to Literature.

He was inducted into the 2010 New Jersey Hall of Fame for his services and contributions to Literature.

He was born in Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey.

He graduated from Weequahic High School the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey.

He was awarded the 2010 National Humanities Medal for his contributions to American letters. He is the author of 24 novels, including "Portnoys Complaint" and "American Pastoral," which won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, and his criticism has appeared in literary journals.

(March 2008) He celebrated his 75th birthday with friends and colleagues at the Miller Theater at Columbia University in New York City.

(March 2007) He splits his time between New York City and Warren, Connecticut where he has residences.

Was the first and only person to do a scene with Marilyn Monroe at The Actors Studio.

Served in the Army during WWII, then moved to New York City, where he began studying acting with Lee Strasberg.

Appeared in various stage roles before landing guest TV shots.

His last appearance was in the independent film A League of Old Men .

Veteran character actor; born in Kansas City, Missouri.

This will come as a great shock to young people, but in 1951 you could,make it through college unscathed by oral sex.

With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you,got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two years your life,stopped. If you had been running in the direction of your life, you had,to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain,boring.

As I see it, my focus has never been on masculine power rampant and,triumphant but rather on the antithesis: masculine power impaired. I,have hardly been singing a paean to male superiority but rather,representing manhood stumbling, constricted, humbled, devastated and,brought down. My intention is to present my fictional men not as they,should be but vexed as men are.

Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste.

I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, "Is he as crazy as I am?" I don’t need that question answered.

Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself,a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. . . . What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself — a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required. . . . I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.

Not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized--that was the dream of his life.

True, he had chosen to live alone, but not unbearably alone. The worst of being unbearably alone was that you had to bear it - either that or you were sunk. You had to work hard to prevent your mind from sabotaging you by its looking hungrily back at the superabundant past.

One’s story isn’t a skin to be shed— it’s inescapable, one’s body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that’s at once your invention and the invention of you.

This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.

I understood that people are trying to transform themselves all the time: the universal urge to be otherwise. So as not to look as they look, sound as they sound, be treated as they are treated, suffer in the ways they suffer, etc.

etc.

they change hairdos, tailors, spouses, accents, friends, they change their addresses, their noses, their wallpaper, even their forms of government, all to be more like themselves or less like themselves, or more like or less like that exemplary prototype whose image is theirs to emulate or to repudiate obsessively for life.

There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.

. . . I realized that my father, of all these men, was the most obstinate, helplessly bonded to his better instincts and their excessive demands. I only then understood that he had quit his job not merely because he was fearful of what awaited us down the line should we agree like the others to be relocated, but because, for better or worse, when he was bullied by superior forces that he deemed corrupt it was his nature not to yield--in this instance, to resist either running away to Canada, as my mother urged our doing, or bowing to a government directive that was patently unjust. There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty And Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom . . .

You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.

He was trying hard to continue to exist as himself despite the unlikeliness of everything.

Memories particularly of when they weren’t being what parents are nine-tenths of the time, the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the nags of pick-that-up and you’re-going-to-be-late, keepers of the diary of her duties and routines, memories, rather, of when they found one another afresh, beyond the tensions between parental mastery and inept childish uncertainty, of those moments of respite in a family’s life when they could reach one another in calm,None of us ate together: my Aunt Gladys ate at five o’clock, my cousin Susan at five-thirty, me at six, and my uncle at six-thirty. There is nothing to explain this beyond the fact that my aunt is crazy.

Simple is never that simple.

It is not our high purposes alone that make us moving creatures, but our humble needs and cravings.

I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a picnic and that I was no picnic myself.

A Jewish man with parents alive is a 15-year-old boy and will remain a 15-year-old boy until they die.

I work all day, morning and afternoon, just about every day. If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book.

Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline.

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.

People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.

A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple. .