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.
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.