A Quote by Philip Roth
Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life.
Related Quotes
We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavor to shine. We labor unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence and neglect the real.
Aaranya Kaandam' is not the biography or history of a gangster but a page out of the life of a gangster. It is like a day in his life.
Almost any biography will have its useful suggestions for making life a success, but none better or more unfailing than the biography of Christ.
I have had the unfortunate experience of having someone write an unauthorised biography of me. Half of it is lies and the other half is badly written. My feeling is that if I'm going to write my life story, I ought to have my life first.
Life, individual or collective, personal or historic, is the one entity in the universe whose substance is compact of danger, of adventure. It is, in the strict sense of the word, drama. The primary, radical meaning of life appears when it is employed in the sense not of biology, but of biography. For the very strong reason that the whole of biology is quite definitely only a chapter in certain biographies, it is what biologists do in the portion of their lives open to biography.
I tend to think in dramatic terms. In life, there may be an actual drama, but it would be the fictionalized, imagined drama that engaged me.
MATERIAL, adj. Having an actual existence, as distinguished from an imaginary one. Important.
A biography is never a biography of one person, of course, but the individual life of your protagonist will never conform. It will always bang up against history.
I always thought that I would spend the first half of my life making money so I can spend the second half of my life giving it all away. And one of the defining moments of my life was when I realized that I could do both at the same time with TOMS.
I spent the first half of my life making money and the second half of my life giving it away to do the most good and the least harm.
False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is incarnation. Here the impossible union of spheres of existence is actual. Here the past and future are conquered and reconciled.
If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I'd have fewer imaginary ones.
Now, as when I made films that were too autobiographical, the problem is how to escape naturalism. If you tell a strictly true story, because the way you are telling it is false, it creates naturalism. But I become a naturalist. And to become a naturalist is something I avoid. It is fake life - that is the problem. It is because we are familiar with situationnisme, and the critique of the spectacle, et cetera, which is a very fair criticism. People who have no life, and who watch this fake life on a screen - it's a very alienated situation. And that's what situationnisme is about.
If all history is only an amplification of biography, the history of science may be most instructively read in the life and work of the men by whom the realms of Nature have been successively won.
Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
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