Philip roth

When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

Should you protect profits? Yes. But run for the hills? No.

With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two years your life stopped. If you had been running in the direction of your...

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.

Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your...

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.

Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.

Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.