Quotes

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.

(What he calls his incredibly popular novel "The World According to Garp"): "An artfully-disguised soap opera."

There's a minority which is an open target in this country which no one protects, and that's rich people.

In my novels I have always been attracted to sexual outsiders or misfits. I am drawn to these characters because I love them. But I also fear for them. I'm afraid of how the more mainstream world will abuse and mistreat them.

[on his novel 'In One Person] 'The World According to Garp' was about intolerance of sexual differences. Well, here is that subject again - this time from the point-of-view of a bisexual man. Too bad that sexual intolerance doesn't go away. The situation for gay rights is a little better than it used to be, but there are still troglodytes opposed to gay marriage. The Republican presidential candidates seem to think that mocking gay rights is okay and that opposing abortion rights is an obligation.

You never see a great wrestler who doesn't drill, who stops fanatically practicing his best shot. 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. If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.

I remember thinking when I finished 'Garp', 'Thank God I'll never have to write again about the issue of sexual tolerance or anger at sexual intolerance. That will be over by the time I write my next book', How naive.

My grandmother died a few days short of her one-hundredth birthday, and [near the end] her only memories were the ones that made her laugh or cry. She would be laughing, telling a story, and suddenly her face would darken because half the people in it were dead. I thought, 'This is it. This is what you do. You think of the funniest fucking thing you can think of and then you turn on a dime until it's not funny at all'.

I wasn't afraid of anything until I had a kid. Then I was terrified because immediately I could imagine a hundred ways in which I could not protect him. But I also got my subject: what are you afraid of? The subject is always what are you afraid of. I don't begin a novel unless there's something in it that makes me say, 'God, please don't let this happen to me'.

[on 'In One Person'] One reason this book took only two years to write is that, from a research point-of-view, it was easy. I remember those terribly conflicted feelings that any young boy feels in an all-boy school, where some of the older boys are forbiddingly attractive to you. You're attracted to everything in sight: faculty wives, your friends' mothers. You think, 'Jesus,can I please be attracted to somebody I'm supposed to be attracted to?'

I'm not enamoured of the whole Hemingway-Fitzgerald bullshit that consumes American idolatry of writers. I think Hemingway's an awful writer. And why did those two write their best novels when they were 27? Because they were drunks. If I'd written my best novel at the age of 27, what sort of pig would I be?