PHILIP ROTH

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

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

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.

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

Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline.

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

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

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

Nothing keeps its promise.

All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

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

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!

Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.

History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

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.

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 imaginings of the facts.

I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.

People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.

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 life, you had to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain boring.

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.

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

Let me tell you about the nap. It's absolutely fantastic. When I was a kid, my father was always trying to tell me how to be a man. And he said - I was maybe nine - he said, 'Philip, whenever you take a nap, take your clothes off and put a blanket over you, and you're going to sleep better.' Well, as with everything, he was right.

As I see it, my focus has never been on masculine power rampant and triumphant but rather on the antithesis: masculine power impaired.

If I don't measure up as an American writer, at least leave me to my delusion.