Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.

Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.

For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.

Ted Seabrooke, my wrestling coach, had a kind of Nietzschean effect on me in terms of not just his estimation of my limited abilities, but his decidedly philosophical stance about how to conduct your life, what you should do to compensate for your limitations. This was essential to me, both as a student - and not a good one - and as a wrestler who was not a natural athlete but who had found something he loved.

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

Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.