Life,” Garp wrote, “is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.
JOHN IRVINGYou only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
More John Irving Quotes
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A writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
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It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
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Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president’s particular agenda – and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
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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.
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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents’ own rule.
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You can’t learn everything you need to know legally.
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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 have pretty thick skin, and I think if you’re going to be in this business, if you’re going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
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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.
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There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
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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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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
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I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.
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We permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it – and reward it in all manner of ways.
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
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If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
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Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
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I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
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Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can’t even remember having met you
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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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In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
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They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
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What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman’s freedom of choice, too.
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In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.
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YOU LET ME DROWN!” Owen said. “YOU DIDN’T DO ANYTHING! YOU JUST WATCHED ME DROWN! I’M ALREADY DEAD!” he told us. “REMEMBER THAT: YOU LET ME DIE.
JOHN IRVING -
I suppose I’m proudest of my novels for what’s imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
JOHN IRVING