The lie, of course, is more interesting.

Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.

Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.

In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases

When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.

I'm not at all contemporary, not even modern, and the fact that I would be so quaintly attracted to that wrestling rule makes me, I suppose, seem all the more old-fashioned. I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.

I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.