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Portnoy's Complaint made Roth a rich man. In May 1968, he was in debt for eight thousands dollars: "I had been sitting in my room like in Solzhenitsyn's cell," he says, "doling out this money to Maggie and being angry." Suddenly, in June, Maggie was dead, his book was finished, and a messenger had delivered a publisher check for a quarter of a million dollars. (life magazine: "What's the tip on a quarter of a million?") He paid off his debts, he bought a car, he moved to a nice apartment on the East Side, and he took Ann Mudge in a first-class trip to Europe, sailing on the France, He hadn't bought any clothes in years, so he had several suits made at one of the poshest tailors in London--Kilgour, French & Stanbury, on Savile Row. The experience wasn't as unfamiliar as he'd expected. "It was like the Temple B'nai Jeshurun in there," he assures me. "The cloth was like the Torah ark, and the silence and the light coming through the dirty windows, and all the tailors were Jews." He had more bespoke suits made elsewhere. He propositioned the first attractive journalist who was sent to interview him. He hired a call girl, while Ann was off somewhere, for an hour in a London hotel. "I was dizzy," he remembers, "dizzy with success and freedom and money." 

Roth Unbound
Claudia Pierpont

the story of the every day grind

Coetzee is known as reclusive and avoids publicity to such an extent that he did not collect either of his two Booker Prizes in person. South African writer Rian Malan has said that:

Coetzee is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke, or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word.

Asked about this comment in an interview by email, Coetzee said, "I have met Rian Malan only once in my life. He does not know me and is not qualified to talk about my character."

source for this material: Wikipedia.