You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.

If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.

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.

Human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions.

We permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it - and reward it in all manner of ways.