When you legislate personal belief, you’re in violation of freedom of religion.
JOHN IRVINGKids 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.
More John Irving Quotes
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A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.
JOHN IRVING -
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
JOHN IRVING -
You don’t want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
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You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I’m going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life
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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
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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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I don’t begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
JOHN IRVING -
Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
JOHN IRVING -
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.
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It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don’t expect me to change.
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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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I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.
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There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
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Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don’t mean that you can’t also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose.
JOHN IRVING