Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.
It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.
The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.
I always know more about the ending, even the aftermath to the ending, than I know about the beginning. And so there's a construction that works from back to front.
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.
The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.
We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean - make sure they know what they mean!
Death, it seems," Garp wrote, "does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.
Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.
I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.
When you legislate personal belief, you're in violation of freedom of religion.
If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.
I thought some of the stories were neat; I liked some of the liturgy and some of the songs. If you're a writer you have some inclination to pay attention. I didn't just tune it out and think about baseball. So, it had an effect on me.
Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don't mean that you can't also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose.
If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn't very vital.
Grown-ups shouldn’t finish books they’re not enjoying. When you’re no longer a child, and you no longer live at home, you don’t have to finish everything on your plate. One reward of leaving school is that you don’t have to finish books you don’t like.
There's nothing as scary as the future.
Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
Imagining something is better than remembering something.
I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
I always begin with a character or characters, and then try to think up as much action for them as possible.
He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.
Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.
The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
I'm not typing. I write only by longhand. I've always written first drafts by hand and then once I was into a second or third draft I wrote insert pages on a typewriter. But I got rid of all my typewriters about three or four novels ago and now I do everything by hand. I write by hand because it makes me go slow and going slow is what I like.
People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
People regard art too highly, and history not enough
I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.
A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
All his life he would hold this moment as exemplary of what love was. It was not wanting anything more, nor was it expecting people to exceed what they had just accomplished; it was simply feeling so complete.
All the unimaginative assholes in the world who imagine that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because it was impossible from what we know about Shakespeare of Stratford that such a man would have had the experience to imagine such things - well, this denies the very thing that separates Shakespeare from almost every other writer in the world: an imagination that is untouchable and nonstop.
Half my life is an act of revision; more than half the act is performed with small changes.
A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
The object of war is to survive it.
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 of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.
And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
Adolescence-is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?
With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes.
If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
And never forget, there is memory.
Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life
I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.
Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.
Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst and I'm not an intellectual.
Half my life is an act of revision.
I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
And Father said, “There are no happy endings.” “Right!” cried Iowa Bob – an odd mixture of exuberance and stoicism in his cracked voice. “Death is horrible, final, and frequently premature,” Coach Bob declared. “So what?” my father said. “Right!” cried Iowa Bob. “That’s the point: So what?” Thus the family maxim was that an unhappy ending did not undermine a rich and energetic life. This was based on the belief that there were no happy endings.
They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, "I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure." It doesn't bother me if people feel that way.
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.
All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
Ever since the Christmas of 1953, 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 giving can be as greedy as receiving-Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.
Anyone can be sentimental about the nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don’t believe in the resurrection, you’re not a believer." “If you don’t believe in Easter,” Owen Meany said. “Don’t kid yourself—Don’t call yourself a Christian.
A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
We are formed by what we desire
It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.
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 of stamina.
We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.
It's because even a good man can't always be right, that we need ... rules.
Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else's version of themselves--to anyone else's version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!
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 love any more than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know. And that's hard, ..., because you often feel like interfering -you want to be the one who makes the plans.
There was no manifestation of contemporary culture that did not indicate to my grandmother how steadfast was the nation's decline, how merciless our mental and moral deterioration, how swiftly all-embracing our final decadence. I never saw her read a book again; but she referred to books often - as if they were shrines and cathedrals of learning that television had plundered and then abandoned.
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.
Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.
I've always been interested in miracles, or the miraculous of the unexplained. I don't scoff at what makes people believe or want to believe. I think I understand the tremendous attraction of the mysteries of the church to the same degree that I understand and appreciate the frustration people feel, especially believers, with the human rule-making arm of the church, with the not-miraculous part of the church - any church.
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. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.
My life as a writer consists of 1/8 talent and 7/8 discipline.
Life is an X-rated soap opera.
Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.
Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
My life is a reading list.
… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human.
We invent what we love and what we fear.
This is a writer’s lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.
Keep passing the open windows.
I have no respect for the right-to-life position. But when you legislate personal belief, you're in violation of freedom of religion. The Catholic Church may espouse its opinion on abortion to the members of its congregation. But they are in violation of separation of church and state when they try to proselytize their abortion politics on people who are not Catholics.
Human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions.
You think you have a memory; but it has you!
In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they’re foreigners - even in their native lands. In our hearts... there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate loneliness are no less lonely than those who are suddenly surprised by loneliness, nor are they undeserving of our pity.
Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.
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 from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.
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.
We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly--as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth--the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives
Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
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 sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.
Life is serious but art is fun!
If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.
If I had to be anything," he told her, "I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.
But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.
Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
I feel more a part of the wrestling community than I feel I belong to the community of arts and letters. Why? Because wrestling requires even more dedication than writing because wrestling represents the most difficult and rewarding objective that I have ever dedicated myself to; because wrestling and wrestling coaches are among the most disciplined and self-sacrificing people I have ever known.
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.
It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!
It's magical thinking to imagine that the reason unspeakable things are being perpetrated by younger and younger people is that they've fallen under the influence of seductive, lascivious, prurient, and violent material in books, films, television. A great deal of this type of censorship has to do with absolving parents of responsibility - parents who just plop their kids in front of the television and leave them there hour upon hour.
Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.
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.
