“Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them …”

“What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book—if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don’t. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise …”

— Philip Roth, The Art of Fiction