Philip Roth

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

"I think being funny is not anyone's first choice."

"We're all looking for a way out of the human condition."

"No one in this world gets an easy birth, excepting S.O.B.s."

"You cannot know the past completely, and you can never change it anyway."

"All the suffering in the world is caused by ignorance."

"Everybody else is even more f***ed up than you are."

"There is no backstage. What you see is what you get."

"The book cannot compete with the screen."

"Morality is for the weak."

"I am full of errors and resentment."

"The fact of America is that it is a country where no man has ever needed to listen to any woman."

"A writer has to get used to loneliness."

"What binds these communities together is resilience."

"You must hate very much before you can say that you hate."

"The sadness is the only honesty."

"One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often."

"Get the facts first. You can distort them later."

"I think the truly political thing is to have no message at all."

"Art should be irrelevant."

"I write about the American middle class."

"The most heinous act in literary history is plagiarism."

"We are all looking for the right person."

"No one dies in a story. Everyone dies outside of one."

"Literature is not a luxury."

"The family is an American myth."

"To be a novelist is to be a confidant."

"The American dream is a fiction written by the powerful."

"Desire is boundless in the American soul."

"There's no getting around it: life is tremendously exciting."