When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.

I am compulsive about writing, I need to do it the way I need sleep and exercise and food and sex; I can go without it for a while, but then I need it.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.

When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.

Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.

I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.