Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.

How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.

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

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

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.

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.