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In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us — not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.

John Irving

In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
JOHN IRVING

Scene Treatment Voice
A novel is a piece of architecture. It’s not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It’s a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
JOHN IRVING

Diaries Floor Wall Writing
But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.
JOHN IRVING

Busy People Thinking
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
JOHN IRVING

Stories Victim Writing
Life is serious but art is fun!
JOHN IRVING

Art Fun Life
My brain is sending poison to my heart.
JOHN IRVING

Brain Heart Poison
It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
JOHN IRVING

Exhausting Knows Seventeen
The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.
JOHN IRVING

Love Reason Writing
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
You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I’m going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life
JOHN IRVING

Adventure Everybody Father Real
A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.
JOHN IRVING

Boiled Life Sentences
In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
JOHN IRVING

Cases Meany Owen World
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.
JOHN IRVING

Alive Hero Trying
Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
JOHN IRVING

Bears Practice Promise
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
JOHN IRVING

Beginning Ends Grows Growth
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

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us — not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.

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In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us — not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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