I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

I thought some of the stories were neat; I liked some of the liturgy and some of the songs. If you're a writer you have some inclination to pay attention. I didn't just tune it out and think about baseball. So, it had an effect on me.

I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.

I always know more about the ending, even the aftermath to the ending, than I know about the beginning. And so there's a construction that works from back to front.

Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.

Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.

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