Philip Roth

"We are imprisoned by our own perspectives."

"To write is to attempt to capture the uncapturable."

"The self is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves."

"What we inherit from our parents is both gift and curse."

"To live is to be perpetually surprised by what you discover about yourself."

"The imagination is the most democratic faculty we possess."

"We are all, in essence, liars trying to tell the truth."

"To be human is to desire what we cannot have."

"The writer must be willing to betray everyone, including himself."

"We are shaped by our resistances and our surrenders."

"To live authentically is to live dangerously."

"The greatest gift is to be understood by another human being."

"We are all driven by forces we only partially comprehend."

"To write is to explore the boundaries of the possible."

"The self is always in the process of becoming."

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

"I think the role of the writer is to chronicle the times in which he lives."

"Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them."

"You must believe in free will; there is no choice."

"We are the sum of our own choices."

"It is the humor that makes the tragedy bearable."

"Everybody who has ever lived has had some point of view about things."

"The complication in storytelling is that you can't avoid being yourself."

"I have always believed that if you are going to write, you must commit yourself to it."

"Real maturity is when a person hurts and they do not strike back."

"No less important are the things we choose to leave out."

"The fake is second nature to us; we don't even know how to be real anymore."

"Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, into another's skin."

"You write fiction because you need to—it's a compulsion."

"America has moved from a farming to a business to a service economy."