You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore. And if you're not either people think there is something wrong with you....but there is nothing wrong with me

In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases

In Ruth's view, they looked 'like a couple' because they seemed to possess some terrible secret between them - they appeared stricken with remorse when they saw her. Only a novelist could ever imagine such nonsense. (In part, it was because of her perverse ability to imagine anything that in this instance Ruth failed to imagine the obvious)

Ruth Cole was a novelist; novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police - preferably in writing.

MAYBE YOU SHOULD BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR. AT LEAST, YOU GET TO READ STUFF THAT'S WRITTEN BY PEOPLE WHO CAN WRITE! YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING TO BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR, YOU DON'T NEED ANY SPECIAL TALENT, YOU JUST HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT SOMEONE WANTS YOU TO SEE - TO WHAT MAKES SOMEONE ANGRIEST, OR THE MOST EXCITED IN SOME OTHER WAY. IT'S SO EASY!; I THINK THAT'S WHY THERE ARE SO MANY ENGLISH MAJORS!

No matter what my fucking last words were, please say they were these: 'I have always known that the pursuit of excellence is a lethal habit.

Wizened and white, with brown blotched on her face the size and complexity of unshelled peanuts, Midge had a jitter in her head that made her pew like a chicken trying to make up its mind what to peck.