Quotes from Wally Lamb

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

The greatest griefs are silent.

Maybe that's what love is. Having someone who guides you through different experiences, coaxes you to try news things but still makes you feel safe.

that's the funny thing about mazes: what's baffling on the ground begins to makes sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself". (p. 717)

That's the trouble with survival of the fittest, isn't it, Dominick? The corpse at your feet. That little inconvenience.

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

The evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

I love the most the students with troubled lives.

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

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

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