…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.

This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.

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

You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.

I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them...they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.

No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him.

For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.