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.

I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things.

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

I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

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

I do not know why it matters that I should tell the truth to myself at night, why it should matter that the truth should be spoken at least once in the world. Because the world is a place of silence, the sky at night when the birds have gone is a vast silent place. Words will make the slightest difference to the sky at night. They will not brighten it or make it less strange. And the day too has its own deep indifference to anything that is said.

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.