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.
Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true.
You live your life at the time you live it – you don’t have much of an overview when what’s happening to you is still happening.
She was an expert at the art of sudden appearance.
All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let’s just leave them be. Don’t judge them. You are not superior to them – don’t put them down.
Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.