Philip Roth Fiction Quotations

The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.

What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel.

I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.

I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.