If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don’t expect me to change.
In this dirty minded world, you are either someone’s wife or someone’s whore. And if you’re not either people think there is something wrong with you….but there is nothing wrong with me
In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true.
It doesn’t really matter who said it – it’s so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.
O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
Life,” Garp wrote, “is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.
Many things the gods achieve beyond our judgement,'” said the sorrowful girl. “‘What we thought is not confirmed and what we thought not God contives.
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.”, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)
You can’t learn everything you need to know legally.
The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you will believe that your future relationships will have disappointing – even devastating – consequences.
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 ei
In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
WHAT I’M TELLING YOU IS, IF YOU WANT TO DO THINGS YOUR OWN WAY, YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO MAKE A DECISION – YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO FIND A LITTLE COURAGE.
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.
Well, you finally got me,” Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on his back on the wrestling mat, wondering who had gotten whom.
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.
Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
If you’re a writer, the problem is that, when you try to call a halt to thinking about your novel-in-progress, your imagination still keeps going; you can’t shut it off.
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.
You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
Never trust a man with a lunatic wife in an attic,” Richard told me. “And anyone named Heathcliff should make you suspicious.
When time passes, it’s the people who knew you whom you want to see; they’re the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what’s it matter what they did to you?
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
Garp didn’t want a daughter because of men. Because of bad men, certainly; but even, he thought, because of men like me.
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 will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
Your memory is a monster; you forget -it doesn’t. It simply files thingsaway. 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!
That’s okay,” I said. “We’re writers. We make things up.
It’s because even a good man can’t always be right, that we need … rules.
We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
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.
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.
No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen…You shouldn’t have a baby if there’s no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.
You can’t possibly know that you’re going to be a writer!” Miss Frost said. “It’s not a career choice.
If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us — not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.
Small towns may revile you, but they have to keep you-they can’t turn you away.
A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.
And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.
…nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
…the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.
Ruth knew very well what the killer thought he had heard: he’d heard the sound of someone trying not to make a sound – that’s what he’d heard.
I’ll bet every fucking one of your angels is going to be terrifying!
At times, he admitted, he had been very happy in the apple business. He knew what Larch would have told him: that his happiness was not the point, or that it wasn’t as important as his usefulness.
…where our desires “come from”; that is a dark, winding road.
Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
And what were the rules at St. Cloud’s? What were Larch’s rules? Which rules did Dr. Larch observe, which ones did he break, or replace–and with what confidence?
Just because you’re sober, don’t think you’re a good driver, Cookie.
Men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
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.
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casual
Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren’t they?
…the single ingredient in American literature that distinguishes it from other literatures of the world is a kind of giddy, illogical hopefulness. It is quite technically sophisticated while remaining ideologically naïve.
I grew up around books – my grandmother’s house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around.
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.
The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.
With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it’s like to live in someone else’s shoes.
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 suppose I’m proudest of my novels for what’s imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
I’m not writing non-fiction. I don’t feel anything about me as a kid was unique. Except that I had more interest in being alone and using my imagination.
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.