“It was from just a few sentences that a writer learned anything from another writer.”

“There’s nothing I need or want to know from the writers I admire that isn’t in their books. It’s better to read a good writer than meet one.”

“but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.”

“The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.”

“...nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.”

“I realize that a writer's business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again; forever.”

“Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either."(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)”