It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.
There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it’s still going to be a comic novel.
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.
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.
Half my life is an act of revision.
Your memory is a monster; it summons with will of its own. You think you have a memory, but it has you.
Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
A novel is a piece of architecture. It’s not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It’s a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
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!
Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer’s irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn’t reading.
If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
It doesn’t really matter who said it – it’s so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We invent what we love and what we fear.