Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.
Interpretation
Writers can find inspiration in any experience, even negative ones.
Philip Roth's quote suggests that for a writer, all experiences, whether good or bad, can serve as valuable material for their work. It emphasizes the idea that adversity and challenges can lead to creativity and deeper exploration of the human condition in literature.
In practice
In a writing workshop, you might use this quote to encourage participants to draw from personal struggles for their stories.
American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property--on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.
I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.
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
When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
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.
That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.
My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression. I don’t think anybody can separate art from politics. The intention to separate [the two] is itself a very political intention.
You can't intellectually purge yourself of who you are. Whatever that is, it's going to come out in the wash, the film wash. What you are is going to be relevant, if not to yourself, to the movies you make.
When writing loses touch with the beautiful surface of the world, it loses its way. You always want to be in touch with how things look and what people say and what they call their dogs.
I can communicate far better on a guitar than I can through my mouth.
No movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.
Words are like gems to me... imagine yourself walking through a very shallow stream and picking up beautiful stones that catch your eye... that's what names are like for me.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.