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.
The song is ended, but the melody lingers on.
When I go to the cinema, I'm often frustrated because I can guess exactly what is going to happen about ten minutes into the screening. So, when I'm working on a subject, I'm always looking for the element of surprise.
Music is...the coordination between man and time.
The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that!
Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.
I realised I had spent the majority of my adult life doing two characters - Maude from 1972-'79 and Dorothy from 1985-'92 - and I really didn't know what I wanted to do after 'Golden Girls.' I knew what I didn't want to do - any more sitcoms, or wait for the next great role that might never come.
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