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.
I always begin with a character or characters, and then try to think up as much action for them as possible.
If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don’t think I’m very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
You think you have a memory; but it has you!
The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.
Sometimes that’s a year, sometimes it’s 18 months, where all I’m doing is taking notes. I’m reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.
Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.
And never forget, there is memory.
You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
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.
He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.
As it was, things went from bad to worse, as they often will when amateurs are involved in an activity that they perform in bad temper – or in a hurry.
The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.
But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.
Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax...
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.
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?
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.