A novel is a piece of architecture. It’s not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It’s a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
You’re nice,’ Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. ‘And you’re my oldest friend.’ But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don’t mean that you can’t also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose.
Life,” Garp wrote, “is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.
Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
You don’t want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I’m going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life
