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

John Irving

He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
JOHN IRVING

Lessons Moral
If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don’t have one. But we are a country – USA – that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.
JOHN IRVING

Country Religious Running
Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true.
JOHN IRVING

Care Rumor Stories
Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
JOHN IRVING

Bears Practice Promise
You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
JOHN IRVING

Obsessed Obsession Psychology
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
JOHN IRVING

Art Hard Work Serious
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
But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.
JOHN IRVING

Busy People Thinking
You can’t say you’re going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We – Americans – permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it.
JOHN IRVING

Country Names Play
You don’t want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
JOHN IRVING

Character Giving People
Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
JOHN IRVING

Die Dies Everybody
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 will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.
JOHN IRVING

Civilization Perception Years
…every study of the gods, of everyone’s gods, is a revelation of vengeance towards the innocent.
JOHN IRVING

Innocent Study Vengeance
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

Funeral Hymns Thinking
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

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

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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