I don’t want you to describe to me – not ever – what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.
It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced – when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination.
People only ask questions when they’re ready to hear the answers.
This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.
You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything – maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
Sell my old clothes – I’m off to heaven.
In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
So, I don’t work in terms of real time. I don’t work in a timely fashion.
My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.
You can’t learn everything you need to know legally.
And I find – I’m 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn’t diminished any. That’s the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.
I do know where I’m going and it’s just a matter of finding the language to get there.
I’ve always preferred writing in longhand. I’ve always written first drafts in longhand.
I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.
I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
Wrestling was my first success, the first thing that confirmed that I could be good at anything. Devoting yourself to wrestling, or tennis, or skiing, or dance, or to a musical instrument is a longing to be disciplined for a purpose.