“A wicked generation seeketh ever some new thing and the publishers must publish and the bookseller must book-sell in order to live.”

"Introduction" http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/autobio/1.htm
An Autobiographical Novel (1991)
Context: Any writer, reading over the typescript of a book for the last time before sending it off to the publisher, must wonder what all the effort was for. An autobiography is specially in need of justification to its author. It is a work of self-justification which itself needs justifying. Why have I written this book? Why have I written it the way I have? What does it mean to me? What do I hope it will mean to others?
Each human being has at the final core of self a crystal from which the whole manifold of the personality develops, a secret molecular lattice which governs the unfolding of all the structures of the individuality, in time, in space, in memory, in action and contemplation. Asleep there were just these dreams and no others. Awake there were these actions only. Only these deeds came into being.

Source: Howl and Other Poems

It's a roll call of dead books.
Salon interview (1997)

Upon The Mother Of The Gods (c. 362-363)
Context: Must we then speak of this subject also: and shall we write concerning things that are not to be told, and shall we publish things not to be divulged, and secrets not to be spoken aloud? Who indeed is Attis or Gallos; who the Mother of the Gods; what is the reason of this rule of Chastity; moreover for what cause has such an institution been established among us from remote antiquity; handed down to us indeed from the most ancient of the Phrygians, but accepted in the first place by the Greeks — and those not the vulgar herd, but the Athenians — taught by the event that they had not done well in ridiculing him that was performing the rites of the Great Mother. For they are said to have insulted and driven off the Gallos, as one who was making innovations in religion: because they did not understand the character of the goddess, or how that she was the very "Deo", "Rhea," and " "Demeter" so much honoured amongst them themselves.

"A Visit with Philip Roth," interview with James Atlas, The New York Times Book Review (2 September 1979), p. BR1

Antisthenes, 4.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 6: The Cynics

"A Note on Cabellian Harmonics" in Cabellian Harmonics (April 1928)
Context: A book, once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book "means" thereafter, perforce, — both grammatically and actually, — whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it.

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 237

From the thirteenth book, "The Book of the Dead"
The Pillow Book