You can’t learn everything you need to know legally.

When an orphan is depressed,” wrote Wilbur Larch, “he is attracted to telling lies. A lie is at least a vigorous enterprise, it keeps you on your toes by making you suddenly responsible for what...

…friends were more important than lovers – not least for the fact that friendships generally lasted longer than relationships.

If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything.

No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen…You shouldn’t have a baby if there’s no one who wants...

I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave – and nothing but laughter to console them with.

Savor, don’t gorge.

Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true.

Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think...

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

I’ve always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character,...

For a terrible time of life a teen-ager deceives himself; he believes he can trick the world. He believes he is invulnerable. An adolescent who is an orphan at this phase is in danger of...

A person’s faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to...

It’s because even a good man can’t always be right, that we need … rules.

Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness – in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of...

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn’t say I have a talent that’s special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind...

YOUR BOREDOM IS YOUR PROBLEM,” said Owen Meany. “IT’S YOUR LACK OF IMAGINATION THAT BORES YOU. HARDY HAS THE WORLD FIGURED OUT. TESS IS DOOMED. FATE HAS IT IN FOR HER. SHE’S A VICTIM; IF...

Keep passing the open windows.

Half my life is an act of revision.

I’ll bet every fucking one of your angels is going to be terrifying!

It doesn’t really matter who said it – it’s so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.

Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.

A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.

We invent what we love, and what we fear

JUST BECAUSE A BUNCH OF ATHEISTS ARE BETTER WRITERS THAN THE GUYS WHO WROTE THE BIBLE DOESN’T NECESSARILY MAKE THEM RIGHT!” [Owen Meany] said crossly. “LOOK AT THOSE WEIRDO TV MIRACLE-WORKERS–THEY’RE TRYING TO GET PEOPLE...

In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?

I realize that a writer’s business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again; forever.

Just because you’re sober, don’t think you’re a good driver, Cookie.

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either.

This mannerism of what he’d seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people—because, surely, Wally was nice—would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be...

We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.

I suppose I’m proudest of my novels for what’s imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

Ruth knew very well what the killer thought he had heard: he’d heard the sound of someone trying not to make a sound – that’s what he’d heard.

Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.

Ever since the Christmas of ’53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of...

Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren’t they?

I don’t begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don’t mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences....

This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.

Ruth Cole was a novelist; novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police – preferably in writing.

…where our desires “come from”; that is a dark, winding road.

The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.

Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.

Six-Pack didn’t despise George W. Bush to the degree that Ketchum did, but she thought the president was a smirking twerp and a dumbed-down daddy’s boy, and she agreed with Ketchum’s assessment that Bush would...

Do you really want to go back to those times when orphanages existed and when many orphans were not adopted?

Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label — to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must...

A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy

In Ruth’s view, they looked ‘like a couple’ because they seemed to possess some terrible secret between them – they appeared stricken with remorse when they saw her. Only a novelist could ever imagine such...

She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one – for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best...

So, you see, it’s a real chore for me to write a book review because it’s like a contest. It’s like I’m writing that book review for every bad book reviewer I’ve ever known and...