When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. ‘’I lost one, too,’’ they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn’t lost any children. I’m just a father with...
In both classes, Pastor Merrill preached his doubt-is-the-essence-of-and-not-the-opposite-of-faith philosophy
In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
I TRUST THAT GOD WILL HELP ME, BECAUSE WHAT I’M SUPPOSED TO DO LOOKS VERY HARD.
Did having a dog make you less political?
Churchill Park have their bellies turned toward the sun.
The memoir-novel dumbed down fiction and traduced
YOUR BOREDOM IS YOUR PROBLEM, said Owen Meany. IT'S YOUR LACK OF IMAGINATION THAT BORES YOU. HARDY HAS THE WORLD FIGURED OUT. TESS IS DOOMED. FATE HAS IT IN FOR HER. SHE'S A VICTIM; IF YOU'RE A VICTIM...
My life is a reading list.
JUST BECAUSE A BUNCH OF ATHEISTS ARE BETTER WRITERS THAN THE GUYS WHO WROTE THE BIBLE DOESN'T NECESSARILY MAKE THEM RIGHT! [Owen Meany] said crossly. LOOK AT THOSE WEIRDO TV MIRACLE-WORKERS--THEY'RE T...
In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who su...
It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I'm always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you...
¿No estoy aquí, que soy tu madre?
Women readers kept fiction alive—here was another one.
We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.
This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.
The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
One can learn much through the thin walls of summer houses.
Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolute...
Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.