You can't say you're going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We - Americans - permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it.

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.

The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted.