Wally Lamb quotes:

When I was a kid, I was surrounded by girls: older sisters, older girl cousins just down the street... except for an older boy named Vito who threw rocks. Each year I would wish for a baby brother. It never happened.

Let me tell you something, my wife died for Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you - you don't want to do this yourself.

Its the most breathtakingly ironic things about living: the fact that we are all-identical twins included-alone. Singular. And yet what we seek-what saves us-is our connection to others.

Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.

You can be two things if you're a woman, Dolores. Betty Crocker or a floozy. Just remember your place - even if it kills you.

Love comes in far more shapes and sizes than what the family-values crowd condones, of course.

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.

As my early drawings warned me, where humans go, lions and tidal waves follow.

If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.

I walked over and looked closer at the statue of the goddess. She was wearing a headdress with a skull and a cobra and a crescent moon. Maybe this is what peace of mind was all about: having a poisonous snake on your head and smiling anyway.

Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.

The roundness of life's design may be a sign that there is a presence beyond ourselves.

The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.

All the dead bolts, pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.

Is that what love is all about? Needing them to come back to you when they're away? To come home and keep you safe?

I'd gone to her directly from Dr. Shaw's office - gone without an appointment to find out if happiness was a football you caught or something more complicated, something you had to invent.

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

Getting a job scared her but she was determined not to shy away from risk. That's what life's all about. Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.

Take what people give you. Drink their milkshakes.

With destruction comes renovation.

Human behavior in the midst of hardship caught my attention very early on, and my first stories were all pictures, no words.

Love grows from the rich foam of forgiveness, mongrels make good dogs, and the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.

Sometimes the closer we got to a situation, the less clear it looked.

Her shut-eyed smile transformed itself into something else: the smile of someone brave and knowing, someone whose pain had made her wise.

The evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.

I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned.

Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed."

Here is a girl who is pretty in a quiet way. I bet she's had a very sad life.

Love is like breathing, you take it in and let it out.

A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.

I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.

Love stories are probably all I've ever been able to write or want to write.

But I think this: that whatever prices I've paid, whatever sorrows I shoulder, well, I have blessings, too. Not just my family now, but the others-the ones who have died...They're with me still. They're here...

But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?

Change what you can, accept what you can't, and be smart enough to know the difference

Connecticut is in my blood.

Dialogue comes naturally to me and I can hear the characters' voices in the scenes.

Eastern Connecticut is very different from Western; we're more liverwurst than pâté, more bowling than polo.

First I laughed my way through Elinor Lipman's book of political tweets. Then I put my ear to the ground and listened to Molly Ivins guffawing from the grave. Lipman is a piquant poetic rock star!

Hardest thing: creating something out of nothing - the first draft is torturous.

I am a plodder, I make an appointment with my computer everyday and I have no idea where I am going.

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's, and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I've figured out. I know this much is true.

I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.

I don't know. Maybe we're all chaos theorists. Lovers of pattern and predictability, we're scared shitless of explosive change. But we're fascinated by it, too. Drawn to it. Travelers tap their brakes to ogle the mutilation and mangled metal on the side of the interstate, and the traffic backs up for miles. Hijacked planes crash into skyscrapers, breached levees drown a city, and CNN and the networks rush to the scene so that we can all sit in front of our TVs and feast on the footage. Stare, stunned, at the pandemonium--the devils let loose from their cages.

I grew up in a household of women, they ran the show, they kept it all together. I credit my ability to write in female voices, as well as male, with having grown up with older sisters in a neighborhood largely populated by girls.

I love revising. If you demystify the process, it comes down to four strategies: what can I do to make the draft better; what should I cut out to make it stronger; what do I need to do to clarify it; and finally, what should I reposition.

I love the most the students with troubled lives.

I need to get lost and sometimes my characters lead me to places I don't expect to go.

I think... the secret is to just settle for the shape of your life takes...Instead of you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.

I thought about how love was always the thing that did that - smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.

I try to find something that applies not to me only, but to others, but don't try to control it too much. Essentially it is about what moves us, teaches us about ourselves.

I try to stick with what moves me or teaches me about myself, same thing I hope the novels do for others.

I usually learn more from the situations I hate than the ones I love.

I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read.

I won't read novels while writing novels.

I work hard, do my best and send it out to the world hoping that people can relate to it. I accept any reaction and hope they think it is worth reading.

I write to find out what the story means to me, that is what I try to do especially with the first draft.

If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.

If you risked love, it took you wherever you wanted to go. If you repressed it, you ended up unhappy.

I'm a very rooted person. I grew up in Norwich, Connecticut, I still live in Connecticut.

Life is a whoopee cushion, a chair pulled away just as you were taking a seat.

Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.

Love stories are probably all Ive ever been able to write or want to write.

My Italian-American heritage, of which I'm very proud and with which I identify strongly, surfaces in several of my novels.

My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry.... Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind?

Only there's two sides to every story, you know. You just remember that.

People waste their happiness - that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to be happy.

Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.

So many bad things have happened to them that they can't trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back.

The greatest griefs are silent.

The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness.

What if I don't like adventure? Then cultivate a taste for it. Take a chance. That's how you grow.

When I was a kid... I needed to belong.