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 IRVINGI 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 IRVINGA part of adolescence is feelimg that there’s no one else around who’s enough like youself to understand you.
JOHN IRVINGThere is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
JOHN IRVINGLife is an X-rated soap opera.
JOHN IRVINGMaybe 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 IRVINGYou’re nice,’ Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. ‘And you’re my oldest friend.’ But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
JOHN IRVINGYour 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 IRVINGYou’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
JOHN IRVINGI 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 IRVINGI 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 IRVINGThey were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
JOHN IRVINGA writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
JOHN IRVINGReligious 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 IRVINGHe wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
JOHN IRVINGYou only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
JOHN IRVINGDon’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true.
JOHN IRVING