Philip Roth

I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

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

For me, the passing of time has provided me with subjects I never had before. Subjects I can now look at from a historical perspective. Like the anti-communist era in America. I lived through that. I was a boy; I didn't find a way to write about it until many years later. The same with the Vietnam War.

Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.

Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

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

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.

At night, I read. I read for two hours. I just finished a marvelous book by Louise Erdrich, 'The Round House.' But mostly I read 20th-century history and biography. I lived then. I was either a child or at school or at work.

I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care.

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.