You cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.

I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second.

You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.

You cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.

I'm not at all contemporary, not even modern, and the fact that I would be so quaintly attracted to that wrestling rule makes me, I suppose, seem all the more old-fashioned. I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.

(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action

Owen Meany believed that “coincidence” was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design – more powerful and unstoppable than the Yankee Flyer. (a train)