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but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

John Irving

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
No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin – only four years older than I am – everything, or what little I could discover about him.
JOHN IRVING

Cousin Father Years
I’ve always preferred writing in longhand. I’ve always written first drafts in longhand.
JOHN IRVING

Firsts Writing Written
How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
JOHN IRVING

Eyes Love People Things
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.
JOHN IRVING

Actor Skins Thinking
I’ve always been slow but I’m even slower now. I’m more into the waiting, or I guess I’m more patient about the waiting.
JOHN IRVING

Change More Patient Waiting
No one could have fathomed what a life he’d led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.
JOHN IRVING

Chiefly Lived Mind Mine
…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
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

Anything Dead Remember Watched
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

Imagination Interesting Thinking
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
JOHN IRVING

Art Hard Work Serious
I am compulsive about writing, I need to do it the way I need sleep and exercise and food and sex; I can go without it for a while, but then I need it.
JOHN IRVING

Exercise Sex Sleep Writing
The gardener had a dread of small women; he’d always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.
JOHN IRVING

Dread Gardener Size
Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer’s irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn’t reading.
JOHN IRVING

Cancer Reading Real
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 IRVING

Ends Memories Nihilist
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
JOHN IRVING

Beginning Ends Grows Growth

but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

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but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

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Popular Authors

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