If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.

Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.

Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?

Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.

I'm not proselytizing my method. I don't believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.

but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.

Human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions.