Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My life as a writer consists of 1/8 talent and 7/8 discipline.
A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.
Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.
If you feel so strongly about what's on television, don't have one.
If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
It's because even a good man can't always be right, that we need ... rules.
Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.
There are always suicides among people who are unable to say what they mean.
They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.
It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
When you legislate personal belief, you're in violation of freedom of religion.
A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.
Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.
I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst and I'm not an intellectual.
A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human.
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.
I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.
I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.
Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.
Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.
I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
Half my life is an act of revision; more than half the act is performed with small changes.
but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.
The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.
No one could have fathomed what a life he'd led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.
A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.