Philip Roth:

And there's far less vindictiveness than is imagined on the part of the writer who writes about somebody's secret than just this sort of stupid, childish awe of the human fact of it.  So, it isn't so much that one is pious about one's self or pious about being a writer and say, "Well, I have to be honest."  It's not that at all.  It's you're hypnotized, you're mesmerized, you're fascinated by the thing in itself and you want to present it.

NPR's Fresh Air, May 8, 2000