Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.

It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.

Adolescence-is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?

The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.

Death, it seems," Garp wrote, "does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.

You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.