Here is a interesting interview with Philip Roth. It's of limited interest overall, but the series of comments Roth makes toward the end are most important:

JEFFREY BROWN: Some years ago, I know you were involved with Eastern European writers at a time when they were a kind of moral voice against a totalitarian society. What do you see as your role, or as the role of a writer in our society?

PHILIP ROTH: Your role is to write as well as you can. You're not advancing social causes as far as I'm concerned. You're not addressing social problems.

What you're advancing is... there's only one cause you're advancing; that's the cause of literature, which is one of the great lost human causes. So you do your bit, you do your bit for fiction, for the novel.

JEFFREY BROWN: Why do you think it's become one of the great lost causes of our time?

PHILIP ROTH: My goodness. Um, oh, I don't think in twenty or twenty-five years people will read these things at all.

JEFFREY BROWN: Not at all?

PHILIP ROTH: Not at all. I think it's inevitable. I think the... there are other things for people to do, other ways for them to be occupied, other ways for them to be imaginatively engaged, that are I think probably far more compelling than the novel. So I think the novel's day has come and gone, really.

JEFFREY BROWN: I would imagine you would think this is a great loss for society.

PHILIP ROTH: Yes, I do. There's a lot of brilliance locked up in all those books in the library. There's a lot of human understanding. There's a lot of language. There's a lot of imaginative genius. So, yes, it's a great shame.

JEFFREY BROWN: And what happens for you?

PHILIP ROTH: Me?

JEFFREY BROWN: You.

PHILIP ROTH: (Laughs) I'm going to keep doing it. I'll keep doing it, stubbornly.

Passing, mortality, finitude. All a shame. And it's precisely this notion of it being a shame, something to be regretted but not avoided that, inevitably links mortality to pessimism in my mind. I keep coming back in my own mind to Socrates' comment that philosophy is the art of learning how to die. I can think of no more pressing concern. And if metaphysics, an act of forgetting in the Heideggerian sense, is also the forgetting of the knowledge of how to die, the we can only come back to Being only through our mortality. But the question that haunts me still: how do I accept my death while not accepting it so much that I cannot get out of bed? How do I, as it were, navigate between the Will to Power and the Denial of the Will? In some ways I think philosophy has no more important business than this question, one which must be continually re-negotiated.