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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.

John Irving

The gardener had a dread of small women; he’d always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.
JOHN IRVING

Dread Gardener Size
Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
JOHN IRVING

Condescend Inferiors People
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

Another Day Religious
If pride is a sin … moral pride is the greatest sin.
JOHN IRVING

Moral Pride Sin
The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.
JOHN IRVING

Love Reason Writing
You cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.
JOHN IRVING

Eye Mirrors Repetition Views
It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
JOHN IRVING

Exhausting Knows Seventeen
When writing a novel, I’m not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don’t know what it is.
JOHN IRVING

Enough Smart Writing
I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I’ve seen in the country since John Kennedy.
JOHN IRVING

Country Hopeful Thinking
I’ve always been slow but I’m even slower now. I’m more into the waiting, or I guess I’m more patient about the waiting.
JOHN IRVING

Change More Patient Waiting
…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.
JOHN IRVING

Doors Growing Long
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
I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.
JOHN IRVING

Civilization Perception Years
You can’t learn everything you need to know legally.
JOHN IRVING

Feet Knows Needs
I’m not a movie person. They’re collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.
JOHN IRVING

Collaboration Compromise Heart
I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
JOHN IRVING

Next Novel Writing

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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