I don’t begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story – better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you’re capable of making it.
I’m a worst-case scenario person. I’m only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.
I’m not proselytizing my method. I don’t believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.
Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else’s version of themselves – to anyone else’s version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!
What do Americans know about morality? They don’t want their presidents to have penises but they don’t mind if their presidents covertly arrange to support the Nicaraguan rebel forces after Congress has restricted such aid; they don’t want their presidents to deceive their wives but they don’t mind if their presidents deceive Congress- lie to the people and violate the people’s constitution!
It seems to me that people who don’t learn as easily as others suffer from a kind of learning disability – there is something different about the way they comprehend unfamiliar material – but I fail to see how this disability is improved by psychiatric consultation. What seems to be lacking is a technical ability that those of us called ‘good students’ are born with. Someone should concretely study these skills and teach them. What does a shrink have to do with the process?
Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in the thrilling real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was in the thick-of. We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.
There comes a moment in every life when you must let go with your hands – with both hands.
Women know when men don’t desire them: ghosts and witches, deities and demons, angels of death – even virgins, even ordinary women. They always know; women can tell when you have stopped desiring them.
When people die, Vargas – I mean the people you will always remember, the ones who changed your life – they never really go away,” Pepe told the young doctor.
As for Jenny, she felt only that women – just like men – should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.
The day women stop reading – that’s the day the novel dies!
The chairman of the state board of medical examiners was a retired physician who thought that President Teddy Roosevelt was the only other man in the world besides himself who had not been made from a banana.
What we witnessed with the death of Kennedy was the triumph of television; what we saw with his assassination, and with his funeral, was the beginning of television’s dominance of our culture – for television is at its most solemnly self-serving and at its mesmerizing best when it is depicting the untimely deaths of the chosen and the golden. It is as witness to the butchery of heroes in their prime – and of all holy-seeming innocents – that televisions achieves its deplorable greatness.
At that moment, everyone walks on the sky. Maybe all great decisions are made without a net,” The Wonder herself had told him. “There comes a time, in every life, when you must let go.
Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer – not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, ‘You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.’ Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.
There was no solution,” Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, “but the universal solution that life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day – that is forget oneself.
This mannerism of what he’d seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people – because, surely, Wally was nice – would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At. St. Cloud’s, criticism was plainer – and harder, if not impossible, to conceal.
In every life,” Dolores had said, “I think there’s always a moment when you must decide where you belong.