You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
JOHN IRVINGI’m not a movie person. They’re collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.
More John Irving Quotes
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Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can’t even remember having met you
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Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
JOHN IRVING -
Your memory is a monster; you forget – it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you – and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
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You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
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I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you’re going to be in this business, if you’re going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
JOHN IRVING -
I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
JOHN IRVING -
Life is serious but art is fun!
JOHN IRVING -
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.
JOHN IRVING -
The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.
JOHN IRVING -
Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
JOHN IRVING -
I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
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Death, it seems,” Garp wrote, “does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.
JOHN IRVING -
I suppose I’m proudest of my novels for what’s imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
JOHN IRVING -
What a phrase that is: ‘that explains everything!’ I know better than to think anything ‘explains everything’ today.
JOHN IRVING