the road to hell is paved with works in progress........

ok, so the mm did not say that......it was said by phillip roth.....He published his first book, the collection of short stories Goodbye Columbus, in 1959, and it got good reviews and won several awards. But a few years later, he went to speak at a university in New York City, and the audience attacked him, shouting that he was writing anti-Semitic literature. When he tried to leave the stage, a crowd surrounded him, shouting and waving their fists, and he barely got away without being hurt. Later that night he said, "I'll never write about Jews again." He worked on a novel with no Jewish characters called When She Was Good (1967), but it wasn't any fun to write, and he realized that he couldn't give up on writing about his background. He figured that if everyone thought he was offensive, he might as well try to write a book that was as offensive as possible. He set out write a novel in the wild, obscene voice that he remembered from his childhood friends. He had started psychoanalysis at the time, and he got the idea of writing the book from the point of view of a patient on his psychoanalyst's couch.

That book became Portnoy's Complaint (1969), about Alexander Portnoy—his obsession with sex, and his struggles with his Jewish parents, especially his mother. It begins, "She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise." It was one of the most sexually explicit books ever published, and it became one of the best-selling books of the 1960s. Jewish critics attacked Roth for his portrayal of Jews, and others attacked him for his obscenity, but he had decided that he no longer cared if he offended his readers. He said, "I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you—it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists."

He has gone on to write many more novels, most of them narrated by a fictional writer named Nathan Zuckerman, including American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000). His most recent novel is The Dying Animal (2001). Roth said, "The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress."