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If you asked me one day, I might say, “Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious.” If you asked me another day, I’d just say flat out, “No.”

John Irving

Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
JOHN IRVING

Hatred Loneliness Self
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
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
JOHN IRVING

Stories Victim Writing
People only ask questions when they’re ready to hear the answers.
JOHN IRVING

Answers People Ready
Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true.
JOHN IRVING

Care Rumor Stories
No one could have fathomed what a life he’d led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.
JOHN IRVING

Chiefly Lived Mind Mine
When you legislate personal belief, you’re in violation of freedom of religion.
JOHN IRVING

Belief Freedom Religion Violation
YOU LET ME DROWN!” Owen said. “YOU DIDN’T DO ANYTHING! YOU JUST WATCHED ME DROWN! I’M ALREADY DEAD!” he told us. “REMEMBER THAT: YOU LET ME DIE.
JOHN IRVING

Anything Dead Remember Watched
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.
JOHN IRVING

Sunday Teenage Years
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
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.
JOHN IRVING

Scene Treatment Voice
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.
JOHN IRVING

Character Giving People
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.
JOHN IRVING

Beautiful Kids Men
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.
JOHN IRVING

Kind Thinking Together
It’s a no-win argument – that business of what we’re born with and what our environment does to us. And it’s a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
JOHN IRVING

Environment Growth Winning
Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
JOHN IRVING

Combat Comforting Loneliness

If you asked me one day, I might say, “Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious.” If you asked me another day, I’d just say flat out, “No.”

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If you asked me one day, I might say, “Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious.” If you asked me another day, I’d just say flat out, “No.”

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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