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

Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.

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

Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.

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

I always know more about the ending, even the aftermath to the ending, than I know about the beginning. And so there's a construction that works from back to front.

Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.