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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

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

Scary Writing
…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
We permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it – and reward it in all manner of ways.
JOHN IRVING

Country Rewards Way
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
JOHN IRVING

Art Hard Work Serious
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.
JOHN IRVING

Fun Hurt Mean Stories
He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
JOHN IRVING

Lessons Moral
But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.
JOHN IRVING

Busy People Thinking
Keep passing the open windows.
JOHN IRVING

Depression Encouraging Life
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
JOHN IRVING

Dark Mom Mother
There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
JOHN IRVING

Aware Constantly Reason
As it was, things went from bad to worse, as they often will when amateurs are involved in an activity that they perform in bad temper – or in a hurry.
JOHN IRVING

Activity Bad Temper
Our memory is a monster; you forget it – it does not.
JOHN IRVING

Doe Memories Monsters
People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
JOHN IRVING

People Sound Trying
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’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
You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
JOHN IRVING

Obsessed Obsession Psychology

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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