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

My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.

Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.

… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human.

Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.

I'm not at all contemporary, not even modern, and the fact that I would be so quaintly attracted to that wrestling rule makes me, I suppose, seem all the more old-fashioned. I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.

(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action