I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.

It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book.

I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.

Roth Unbound is filled with intelligent readings and smart judgments. Because of the author's sympathy and sharp mind, it offers real insight into the creative process itself, and into Philip Roth's high calling as a great American artist. The book is, in some ways, a radical rereading of Roth's life and his work. It is impossible, by the end, not to feel a tender admiration for Roth as a novelist and indeed for Claudia Roth Pierpont as an empathetic and brilliant critic.

in skies of deepening blue the moon, heaven's queen was now afloat