The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.

I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst and I'm not an intellectual.

I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, "I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure." It doesn't bother me if people feel that way.

. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .