Philip Roth

United States
Born on 19 Mar 1933
Writer

The Task of an Artist

As an artist the nuance is your task. Your task is not to simplify. Even should you choose to write in the simplest way, a la Hemingway, the task remains to impart the nuance, to elucidate the complication, to imply the contradiction. Not to erase the contradiction, not to deny the contradiction, but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being. To allow for the chaos, to let it in. You "must" let it in. Otherwise you produce propaganda, if not for a political party, a political movement, then stupid propaganda for life itself - for life as it might itself prefer to be publicized.

Philip Roth, in 'I Married a Communist'
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I Married a Communist

Philip Roth

 

On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays