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

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

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...

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’…

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

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...

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

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

And I don’t want to begin something, I don’t want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place,...

The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.

According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I’d written any ficton, by wich she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I prefered this kind of...

Men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God

You don’t want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven’t done what I do. Most book reviewers haven’t written 11...

In this dirty minded world, you are either someone’s wife or someone’s whore. And if you’re not either people think there is something wrong with you….but there is nothing wrong with me

Vielleicht muss es im Leben eines Schriftstellers diesen Augenblick geben, in dem ein anderer Schriftsteller beschuldigt wird, seinen Beruf verfehlt zu haben.

Here is the trap you are in…. And it’s not my trap—I haven’t trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know...

There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.

…the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.

Life,” Garp wrote, “is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even...

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.

All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let’s just leave them be. Don’t judge them. You are not superior to them – don’t put them down.

And I find – I’m 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn’t diminished any. That’s the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.

It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced – when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than...

That’s okay,” I said. “We’re writers. We make things up.

Life is serious but art is fun!

You know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes. No, you have to be able to imagine something else. While you’re skipping rope, you have to be able to...