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When you legislate personal belief, you’re in violation of freedom of religion.

John Irving

…every study of the gods, of everyone’s gods, is a revelation of vengeance towards the innocent.
JOHN IRVING

Innocent Study Vengeance
Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
JOHN IRVING

Creative Maps Writing
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

Finals Knowing Usually Voice
I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
JOHN IRVING

Adults Age Kids
This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
JOHN IRVING

Centered Religion Self
Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.
JOHN IRVING

Practice Religious Two
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!
JOHN IRVING

Memories Monsters Thinking
There are always suicides among people who are unable to say what they mean.
JOHN IRVING

Mean People Suicide
When you legislate personal belief, you’re in violation of freedom of religion.
JOHN IRVING

Belief Freedom Religion Violation
I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, “I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure.” It doesn’t bother me if people feel that way.
JOHN IRVING

Book People Procedure Way
Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
JOHN IRVING

Combat Comforting Loneliness
Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
JOHN IRVING

Condescend Inferiors People
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
But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.
JOHN IRVING

Busy People Thinking
Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
JOHN IRVING

Scary Writing
There’s nothing as scary as the future.
JOHN IRVING

Future Nothing Scary

When you legislate personal belief, you’re in violation of freedom of religion.

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When you legislate personal belief, you’re in violation of freedom of religion.

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