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No one could have fathomed what a life he’d led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.

John Irving

The main character and the most important character are not always the same person – you have to know the difference.
JOHN IRVING

Character Differences Important
So, I don’t work in terms of real time. I don’t work in a timely fashion.
JOHN IRVING

Fashion Real Term Work
You can’t learn everything you need to know legally.
JOHN IRVING

Feet Knows Needs
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
What a phrase that is: ‘that explains everything!’ I know better than to think anything ‘explains everything’ today.
JOHN IRVING

Phrases Thinking Today
Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean – make sure they know what they mean!
JOHN IRVING

Mean People Religious
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
JOHN IRVING

Finished Process Product
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
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
They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
JOHN IRVING

Awkward Procedures Regret
All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let’s just leave them be. Don’t judge them. You are not superior to them – don’t put them down.
JOHN IRVING

Judging Superiors Tolerance
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.
JOHN IRVING

Book Memories Tears
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
But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.
JOHN IRVING

Busy People Thinking
He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
JOHN IRVING

Optimism Quality Risk
It’s a no-win argument – that business of what we’re born with and what our environment does to us. And it’s a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
JOHN IRVING

Environment Growth Winning

No one could have fathomed what a life he’d led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.

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No one could have fathomed what a life he’d led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.

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Popular Authors

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