Philip Roth

I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter, that means you had a hard time during the Bush years.

That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.

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

The novelist's obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word.

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.

Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life.

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.

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

I work all day, morning and afternoon, just about every day. If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book.

For all I know, I am beginning with the ending. My page one can wind up a year later as page two hundred, if it's still even around.

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.

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.

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

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.

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

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

As for the kind of writer I am? I am who I don't pretend to be.

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

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

Routinely, when I finish a book, I think 'What will I do? Where will I get an idea?' And a kind of low-level panic sets in.