There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.

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.

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.

All the unimaginative assholes in the world who imagine that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because it was impossible from what we know about Shakespeare of Stratford that such a man would have had the experience to imagine such things - well, this denies the very thing that separates Shakespeare from almost every other writer in the world: an imagination that is untouchable and nonstop.

I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.

In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.

Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.