If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don’t have one. But we are a country – USA – that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.
JOHN IRVINGA writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
More John Irving Quotes
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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
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Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
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I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn’t terribly painful.
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…every study of the gods, of everyone’s gods, is a revelation of vengeance towards the innocent.
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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.
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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
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What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman’s freedom of choice, too.
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The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
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They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
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They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other…. or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
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…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.
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He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.
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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
JOHN IRVING






