To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.

but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.

It is much easier to be flexible about where a story begins than it ever was for me to change my mind about where and how a story ended.

It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

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

Grown-ups shouldn’t finish books they’re not enjoying. When you’re no longer a child, and you no longer live at home, you don’t have to finish everything on your plate. One reward of leaving school is that you don’t have to finish books you don’t like.

You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.