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# A Patience With Your Own Crap: Philip Roth on Writing
- URL: https://joshualore.com/inthemiddleway/a-patience-with-your-own-crap-philip-roth-on/
- Published: 2015-11-01T18:03:00.000Z
- Updated: 2015-11-01T18:03:00.000Z
- Author: Joshua Lore
- Tags: Uncategorized, #Migrated-1788408094757, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-09-03 00:01

Remnick:—What did experience give you?  
Roth: Patience. That is, the patience to outlast your frustration. The confidence that if you just stay with it you’ll master it, you know? But that doesn’t mean tomorrow necessarily but that I think it gives you confidence in your instincts….You don’t feel like such a gambler, such a risk taker, in laying down the first ten or twenty or fifty pages. So I guess age and experience give you patience, confidence. Though the confidence can be shattered at the end of a first draft. Probably any work where you start with nothing on a page and you have to fill the page is accompanied by a lot of anxiety and a lot of fear. Fear that simply you can’t do it. And frustration as you’re doing it because what comes is very crude. But over the years I think what you develop is a tolerance for your very crudeness. And patience, patience with your own crap, really. And a kind of belief in your crap, which is: just stay with your crap and it’ll get better if you just stay with it. And then come back every day and keep going.

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