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

Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

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.

There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.

I'm a worst-case scenario person. I'm only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.

It seems to me that people who don’t learn as easily as others suffer from a kind of learning disability—there is something different about the way they comprehend unfamiliar material—but I fail to see how this disability is improved by psychiatric consultation. What seems to be lacking is a technical ability that those of us called ‘good students’ are born with. Someone should concretely study these skills and teach them. What does a shrink have to do with the process?

Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president's particular agenda - and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.