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.
Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.
Life is serious but art is fun!
A writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean––make sure they know what they mean!
You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
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.
This is a writer’s lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
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.
In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments – responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.
The lie, of course, is more interesting.
It’s my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support; they want someone to say, “Good job.”
There’s nothing as scary as the future.
He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted.
People regard art too highly, and history not enough.
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.