People only ask questions when they’re ready to hear the answers.
JOHN IRVINGI suppose I’m proudest of my novels for what’s imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
More John Irving Quotes
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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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I’ve always preferred writing in longhand. I’ve always written first drafts in longhand.
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When you legislate personal belief, you’re in violation of freedom of religion.
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
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The gardener had a dread of small women; he’d always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.
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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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A part of adolescence is feelimg that there’s no one else around who’s enough like youself to understand you.
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I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
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…I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar-you live next door to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace.
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Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
JOHN IRVING -
If pride is a sin … moral pride is the greatest sin.
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In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.
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It’s not right to hurt or deceive someone who’s already been hurt and deceived.
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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.
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And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won’t forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
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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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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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Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
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Death, it seems,” Garp wrote, “does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.
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I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
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There are always suicides among people who are unable to say what they mean.
JOHN IRVING -
No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen…You shouldn’t have a baby if there’s no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.
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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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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.
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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 -
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