Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.

My life as a writer consists of 1/8 talent and 7/8 discipline.

Life is serious but art is fun!

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

All his life he would hold this moment as exemplary of what love was. It was not wanting anything more, nor was it expecting people to exceed what they had just accomplished; it was simply feeling so complete.

Life," Garp wrote, "is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.