“I don’t know very much,” says Philip Roth describing how he begins a novel in an recent interview with David Ulin published 10/3/10 in The LA Times.
“I write my way into my knowledge,” Philip Roth says, “Then if I’m lucky, I get a break. That’s why it’s so important to get started. Because however awful starting is–and it is absolutely awful–when you get into it, when you’ve got 10 pages which may take two weeks, then you can begin to build.”
“People think that when a character is angry, the w
riter is angry,” says Roth. “But it’s not as simple as that.”
Philip Roth has found his way to knowledge in many of the most acclaimed works of fiction of the last 40 years–among them Goodbye Columbus (1959) Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) The Ghostwriter (1979) ( The Counterlife (1986) and his most recent novel, Nemesis (2010) as well as non-fiction Patrimony (1991) a page of which is above.
Read the rest of David Ulin’s article about Roth and his Nemesis.
Gwendolyn Alley aka Art Predator
Stop Censorship
Philip Roth is the man.. I have read 7 of his novels this quarter
Starting to write is hard for everybody. When I start though, I am able to keep going. So I really take his words to heart. But writing ten pages is more than a start for me.