Philip Roth (b. 1933)
“Writing isn’t hard work, it’s a nightmare,” Roth said in 1987.
Coal mining is hard work. This is a nightmare…. There’s a tremendous uncertainty that’s built into the profession, a sustained level of doubt that supports you in some way. A good doctor isn’t in a battle with his work; a good writer is locked in a battle with his work. In most professions there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. With writing, it’s always beginning again. Temperamentally, we need that newness. There is a lot of repetition in the work. In fact, one skill that every writer needs is the ability to sit still in this deeply uneventful business.
Roth has cultivated that ability with gusto since at least 1972, when he moved to an austere eighteenth-century house on sixty acres in rural northwest Connecticut. A two-room former guest cottage serves as his studio. He goes there to work each morning after breakfast and exercise. “I write from about 10 till six every day, with an hour out for lunch and the newspaper,” he has said. “In the evenings I usually read. That’s pretty much it.”
For many years he had his second wife, the actress Claire Bloom, as a companion, but since there separation in 1994 he has lived by himself, a condition that seems to suit him. “I live alone, there’s no one else to be responsible for or to, or to spend time with,” he told David Remnick in 2000.
My schedule is absolutely my own. Usually, I write all day, but if I want to go back to the studio in the evening, after dinner, I don’t have to sit in the living room because someone else has been alone all day. I don’t have to sit there and be entertaining or amusing. I go back out and I work for two or three more hours. If I wake up at two in the morning–this happens rarely, but it sometimes happens–and something has dawned on me, I turn the light on and I write in the bedroom. I have these little yellow things all over the place. I read till all hours if I want to. If I get up at five and I can’t sleep and I want to work, I go out and I go to work. So I work, I’m on call. I’m like a doctor and it’s an emergency room. And I’m the emergency.
* Source: Daily Rituals by Mason Currey