I was brought up in a community, in a family that valued such things as good manners, and I still do.

Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.

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.

There was no manifestation of contemporary culture that did not indicate to my grandmother how steadfast was the nation's decline, how merciless our mental and moral deterioration, how swiftly all-embracing our final decadence. I never saw her read a book again; but she referred to books often - as if they were shrines and cathedrals of learning that television had plundered and then abandoned.

Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.