What a phrase that is: 'that explains everything!' I know better than to think anything 'explains everything' today.

You cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.

...I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar-you live next door to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace.

Our memory is a monster; you forget it - it does not.

I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.

Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.