“It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.”

“Life is serious but art is fun!”

“You are my work of art," Wilbur Larch told Homer Wells. "Everything else has just been a job. I don't know if you've got a work of art in you," Larch concluded in his letter to Homer, "but I know what your job is,and you know what it is, too.”

“Homer Wells, listening to Big Dot Taft, felt like her voice – dulled. Wally was away, Candy was away, and the anatomy of a rabbit was, after Clara, no challenge; the migrants, whom he’d so eagerly anticipated, were just plain hard workers; life was just a job. He had grown up without noticing when? Was there nothing remarkable in the transition?”

“She was an expert at the art of sudden appearance.”

“don't worry - so what if there is no life after death? There is life after Garp, believe me.”

“Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid.”