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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents’ own rule.

John Irving

There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
JOHN IRVING

Aware Constantly Reason
If pride is a sin … moral pride is the greatest sin.
JOHN IRVING

Moral Pride Sin
How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
JOHN IRVING

Eyes Love People Things
The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.
JOHN IRVING

Architecture Crafts Writing
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
JOHN IRVING

Finished Process Product
You can’t say you’re going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We – Americans – permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it.
JOHN IRVING

Country Names Play
In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
JOHN IRVING

Energy Father Grandmother
All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let’s just leave them be. Don’t judge them. You are not superior to them – don’t put them down.
JOHN IRVING

Judging Superiors Tolerance
It’s not right to hurt or deceive someone who’s already been hurt and deceived.
JOHN IRVING

Deceived Deceiving Hurt
I’ve always preferred writing in longhand. I’ve always written first drafts in longhand.
JOHN IRVING

Firsts Writing Written
Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
JOHN IRVING

Scary Writing
In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us — not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.
JOHN IRVING

Childhood Events Loss
…I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar-you live next door to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace.
JOHN IRVING

Doors Growing Long
But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.
JOHN IRVING

Busy People Thinking
I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.
JOHN IRVING

Book Long Writing
There’s nothing as scary as the future.
JOHN IRVING

Future Nothing Scary

Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents’ own rule.

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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents’ own rule.

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