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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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....

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

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.

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...

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?

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...

There’s no reason you should write any novel quickly.

Well, you finally got me,” Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on his back on the wrestling mat, wondering who had gotten whom.

Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prostitute with a customer, she had failed to come away with the most important detail of all. She could...

(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action

And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.

If you’re a writer, the problem is that, when you try to call a halt to thinking about your novel-in-progress, your imagination still keeps going; you can’t shut it off.

You can’t possibly know that you’re going to be a writer!” Miss Frost said. “It’s not a career choice.

The inshore lifeboat was very busy with 39 jobs, and the all-weather lifeboat had 11.

When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades...

On his bedside table, between the reading lamp and the telephone, was his battered copy of David Copperfield. Homer didn’t have to open the book to know how the story began. “Whether I shall turn...

Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn’t, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that...

When I was still in prep school – 14, 15 – I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about...

There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.

It galls me that seeking out the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant is the expected (if not altogether acceptable) behavior of male writers; it would surely benefit me, as a writer, if...

Nostalgia!” Miss Frost cried. “You´re nostalgic!” She repeated. “Just how old are you, William?” She asked.”Seventeen, ” I told her.”Seventeen!” Miss Frost cried, as if she’d been stabbed. “Well, William Abbott, if you’re nostalgic at...

In the sixties, dear Bill, we did not say ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ – we said ‘pitcher’ and ‘catcher’…

…nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

It´s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can’t interfere with people...

You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us — not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.

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 a will...

When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. ‘’I lost one, too,’’ they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn’t lost any children. I’m just a...

At times, he admitted, he had been very happy in the apple business. He knew what Larch would have told him: that his happiness was not the point, or that it wasn’t as important as...

People regard art too highly, and history not enough