The main character and the most important character are not always the same person – you have to know the difference.
JOHN IRVINGAs 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.
More John Irving Quotes
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers – good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.
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The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
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The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.
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I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
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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.
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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
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The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.
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Death, it seems,” Garp wrote, “does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.
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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.”
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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
JOHN IRVING






