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.
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
There's so many films from around the world, I emphasize, that are so beautifully photographed, but they don't get the recognition.
I saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial not as an object placed into the earth but as a cut in the earth that has then been polished, like a geode.
People like to say that my work is about making the invisible visible, but that's a misunderstanding. It's about showing what invisibility looks like.
I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.
Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.
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