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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.

John Irving

If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don’t have one. But we are a country – USA – that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.
JOHN IRVING

Country Religious Running
I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them…they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.
JOHN IRVING

Funeral Hymns Thinking
Keep passing the open windows.
JOHN IRVING

Depression Encouraging Life
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
What a phrase that is: ‘that explains everything!’ I know better than to think anything ‘explains everything’ today.
JOHN IRVING

Phrases Thinking Today
When you legislate personal belief, you’re in violation of freedom of religion.
JOHN IRVING

Belief Freedom Religion Violation
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
JOHN IRVING

Love People Wind
There’s nothing as scary as the future.
JOHN IRVING

Future Nothing Scary
How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
JOHN IRVING

Eyes Love People Things
My brain is sending poison to my heart.
JOHN IRVING

Brain Heart Poison
No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin – only four years older than I am – everything, or what little I could discover about him.
JOHN IRVING

Cousin Father Years
Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
JOHN IRVING

Combat Comforting Loneliness
But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.
JOHN IRVING

Busy People Thinking
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
A part of adolescence is feelimg that there’s no one else around who’s enough like youself to understand you.
JOHN IRVING

Adolescence Enough Like
…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.
JOHN IRVING

Found Safety Viruses
Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
JOHN IRVING

Scary Writing
Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president’s particular agenda – and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
JOHN IRVING

Agendas Blind Presidential
The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.
JOHN IRVING

Husband Oxygen Thinking
I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you’re going to be in this business, if you’re going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
JOHN IRVING

Actor Skins Thinking
There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
JOHN IRVING

Four Negotiation Years
It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
JOHN IRVING

Adults Resentment Teenagers
Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer’s irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn’t reading.
JOHN IRVING

Cancer Reading Real
The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
JOHN IRVING

Anticipation Excitement Thrill
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
…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
Life is serious but art is fun!
JOHN IRVING

Art Fun Life

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

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Popular Authors

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