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.
Overacting is a self-indulgence, while underacting comes either through a lack of talent or a lack of courage.
I don't know exactly how I end up with some of these roles. It mystifies me sometimes, but I am a fan of sci-fi. I love being taken into a strange world, and when it's told with imagination and credibility, I love being taken on that trip. I always have.
Making movies is both entirely ludicrous and incredibly hard. It's a preposterous way to spend your time. You give up a lot for the privilege of doing it, and one of the things you get are relationships of immense trust that you see forged in situations of immense stress.
then, as though it had been waiting on a near by roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's face the color of white roses.
The whole world of publishing is moving to electronic, but when you put a poem on a screen and you increase the type size, the shape of a poem changes.
A parallel between color and music can only be relative – just as a violin can give warm shades of tone, so yellow has shades, which can be expressed by various instruments.
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