Sell my old clothes – I’m off to heaven.
In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
So, I don’t work in terms of real time. I don’t work in a timely fashion.
My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.
You can’t learn everything you need to know legally.
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.
I do know where I’m going and it’s just a matter of finding the language to get there.
I’ve always preferred writing in longhand. I’ve always written first drafts in longhand.
I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.
I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
Wrestling was my first success, the first thing that confirmed that I could be good at anything. Devoting yourself to wrestling, or tennis, or skiing, or dance, or to a musical instrument is a longing to be disciplined for a purpose.
Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult – in any way – something in your childhood dies.
My brain is sending poison to my heart.
Being wrong about important things is exhausting.
Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
You don’t want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
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.