Philip Roth Says He\'s Done Writing

Eric Thayer/Reuters Philip Roth in 2010.

Philip Roth has hinted about retirement before, but he recently said definitively that he's done writing books. Mr. Roth, 79, the author of 26 novels and a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, made the statement in an interview with the French magazine Les inRocks, according to a translation published in Salon.

Mr. Roth's last book.

“To tell you the truth, I'm done,” Mr. Ro th told the magazine. “‘Nemesis' will be my last book.”

“I do not want to read, to write more,” Mr. Roth said in the interview, according to Salon. “I have dedicated my life to the novel: I studied, I taught, I wrote and I read. With the exclusion of almost everything else. Enough is enough! I no longer feel this fanaticism to write that I have experienced in my life.”

Mr. Roth will now have more time to clear up interpretations about his work (as he did earlier this year in an open letter to Wikipedia) and to cooperate with his recently named biographer, Blake Bailey.