You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.

Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.

Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water... remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.

It's magical thinking to imagine that the reason unspeakable things are being perpetrated by younger and younger people is that they've fallen under the influence of seductive, lascivious, prurient, and violent material in books, films, television. A great deal of this type of censorship has to do with absolving parents of responsibility - parents who just plop their kids in front of the television and leave them there hour upon hour.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.

Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.