If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.

Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.

You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.

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

I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.

I think that was when the headmaster realized he had lost; he realized then that he was finished. Because, what could he do? Was he going to tell us to stop praying? We kept our heads bowed; and we kept praying. Even as awkward as he was, the Rev. Mr. Merrill had made it clear to us that there was no end to praying for Owen Meany.

He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.