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 IRVINGPeople only ask questions when they’re ready to hear the answers.
More John Irving Quotes
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
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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.
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They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
JOHN IRVING -
Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true.
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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 -
You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
JOHN IRVING -
Our memory is a monster; you forget it – it does not.
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…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 -
If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.
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… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
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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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The ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
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It doesn’t really matter who said it – it’s so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
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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