Life is an X-rated soap opera.
JOHN IRVINGA 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.
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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There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
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The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.
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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.
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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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You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
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Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
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My life is a reading list.
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I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I’ve seen in the country since John Kennedy.
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
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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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In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person – you have to know the difference.
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Our memory is a monster; you forget it – it does not.
JOHN IRVING