Skip to content

Quotes from The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography — Philip Roth

1933–2018 United States

← All quotes by Philip Roth

5 quotes

Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.

The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.

The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

They boo you, they whistle, they stamp their feet — you hate it but you thrive on it. Because the things that wear you down are the things that nurture you and your talent.

The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

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.

The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.

The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Philip Roth (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.