Quotes from book
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

Philip Roth

The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography is a book by Philip Roth that traces his life from his childhood in Newark, New Jersey to becoming a successful, widely respected novelist. The autobiographical section is bookended by two letters, one from Roth to his fictional alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman, the other from Zuckerman himself, telling Roth what he sees as problems with the book.

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

Philip Roth book The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

Opening letter to Nathan Zuckerman
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

Philip Roth photo

“You rebel against the tribal and look for the individual, for your own voice as against the stereotypical voice of the tribe or the tribe's stereotype of itself. You have to establish yourself against your predecessor, and doing so can well involve what they like to call self-hatred. I happen to think that—all those protestations notwithstanding—your self hatred was real and a positive force in its very destructiveness. Since to build something new often requires that something else be destroyed, self-hatred is valuable for a young person. What should he or she have instead—self-approval, self-satisfaction, self-praise? It's not so bad to hate the norms that keep a society from moving on, especially when the norms are dictated by fear as much as by anything else and especially when that fear is of the enemy forces of the overwhelming majority. But you seem now to be so strongly motivated by a need for reconciliation with the tribe that you aren't even willing to acknowledge how disapproving of its platitudinous demands you were back then, however ineluctably Jewish you may also have felt. The prodigal son who once upset the tribal balance—and perhaps even invigorated the tribe's health—may well, in his old age, have a sentimental urge to go back home, but isn't this a bit premature in you, aren't you really too young to have it so fully developed?”

Philip Roth book The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

Nathan Zuckerman to Philip Roth
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

Philip Roth photo

“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.”

Philip Roth book The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

Opening letter to Nathan Zuckerman
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

Philip Roth photo

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

Philip Roth book The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

Opening letter to Nathan Zuckerman.
Referring to the life of a fiction writer
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

Philip Roth photo

“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.”

Philip Roth book The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

Opening letter to Nathan Zuckerman
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

Philip Roth photo

“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.”

Philip Roth book The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

Nathan Zuckerman to Philip Roth
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

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