Philip Roth

"I have always believed that the task of criticism is to separate the dross from the gold."

"The battle against chaos is the great battle of our lives."

"We must accept our lives as they are, not as we wish them to be."

"The freedom to write is the freedom to live."

"Comedy and tragedy are often separated by only a moment."

"Desire is not something to be ashamed of; it is something to be understood."

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

"To write is to risk exposure of one's inner world."

"American life is full of contradictions and tensions."

"The mind is capable of imagining far more than reality can provide."

"What we call normal is often just the pathological that we have grown accustomed to."

"The family is the first battlefield of the self."

"In art, as in life, there are no shortcuts to authenticity."

"We are all trapped by the circumstances of our birth and time."

"Reading is an act of resistance against the world's tendency toward meaninglessness."

"The writer must be willing to write about things that make him uncomfortable."

"Money is not the root of all evil; indifference is."

"What separates the living from the dead is not always clear."

"To be a parent is to be perpetually surprised by your own child."

"The pursuit of happiness is often more difficult than happiness itself."

"A man is not merely what he does, but what he imagines himself to be."

"The greatest enemy of truth is not a lie, but a half-truth."

"We are products of our choices, not our circumstances."

"Moral certainty is the enemy of literature."

"To grow old is to discover that you were always wrong."

"The self is a fiction we create to survive."

"Art is not about making people happy; it is about making them think."

"We are all, in a sense, orphans in the modern world."

"The role of fiction is to illuminate human complexity."

"What we resist, we strengthen; what we accept, we transform."