Philip Roth

"Certainty is a luxury no one can afford."

"Every act is an act of faith."

"Life is not a novel."

"The only truth is change."

"We are all living a performance."

"Meaning is something we create."

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

"I think the purpose of literature is to give people permission to think the unthinkable."

"Writing is a solitary activity, but it's also a conversation with the reader."

"People don't want to hear the truth; they want to hear what makes them feel good."

"There is no truth without context."

"A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy."

"Impotence, inadequacy, invisibility—the major themes of my life."

"Fiction is an act of the imagination; it's not biography."

"One cannot be deeply responsible to the world without being irresponsible to one's family."

"The good deed we do always kills something in us."

"Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared."

"To be a Jew is to accept an enormous burden."

"Freedom is the only universally valid principle."

"Our tragedy is not in our circumstances but in our consciousness."

"The struggle is to keep alive the spark of reason."

"Writing is about the exhilaration of using words to discover what you're thinking."

"The obsession with sex is a symptom of a deeper dissatisfaction."

"Nothing we do has the quickness, the importance, or the beauty of what we have lost."

"To be a bachelor is to be unfree."

"The primary function of art is to show us how to live."

"Suffering is not artistic material—it is real suffering."

"I am not bound by the life I was given."

"The writer's task is to make life meaningful without lying."

"Resentment is where every real story begins."