But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.

I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.

Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.

A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy

It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.