Philip Roth

I said the screen will kill the reader, and it has: the movie screen in the beginning, the television screen, and now the coup de grace, the computer screen.

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets — no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel- on the body of every Jewish child!- not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU'LL BE A PARENT AND YOU'LL KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE.

I needed my life as a springboard for my fiction. I have to have something solid under my feet when I write. I'm not a fantasist. I bounce up and down on the diving board, and I go into the water of fiction. But I've got to begin in life so I can pump life into it throughout.

Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.

You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.

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.

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

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

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

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

I don't know any writer for whom it comes easily. Maybe John Updike - a story would just seem to come to him whole, you know, out of a personal experience. But the rest of us, I think, are not so lucky, and I had to work hard, yeah.

Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.

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

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

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