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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.

John Irving

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

Beginning Ends Grows Growth
All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let’s just leave them be. Don’t judge them. You are not superior to them – don’t put them down.
JOHN IRVING

Judging Superiors Tolerance
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
JOHN IRVING

Finished Process Product
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.
JOHN IRVING

Be Kind Bird Rhinos
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
JOHN IRVING

Dark Mom Mother
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.
JOHN IRVING

Ability Burden Feels
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 IRVING

Fun Hurt Mean Stories
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.
JOHN IRVING

Love People Wind
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
JOHN IRVING

Friend Good Meany Owen Supportive
I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I’ve seen in the country since John Kennedy.
JOHN IRVING

Country Hopeful Thinking
The lie, of course, is more interesting.
JOHN IRVING

Courses Interesting Lying
We permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it – and reward it in all manner of ways.
JOHN IRVING

Country Rewards Way
A part of adolescence is feelimg that there’s no one else around who’s enough like youself to understand you.
JOHN IRVING

Adolescence Enough Like
My life is a reading list.
JOHN IRVING

Life Lists Reading
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
THERE’S NO MONKEY BUSINESS ABOUT THIS ELECTION,’ he told the voters. ‘IF YOU’RE ENOUGH OF AN ASSHOLE TO VOTE FOR NIXON, YOUR DUMB VOTE WILL BE COUNTED––JUST LIKE ANYBODY ELSE!
JOHN IRVING

Dumb Monkeys Voters
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything.
JOHN IRVING

Minutes Way Writing
Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
JOHN IRVING

Combat Comforting Loneliness
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
They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other…. or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
JOHN IRVING

Kind Thinking Together
Wrestling was my first success, the first thing that confirmed that I could be good at anything. Devoting yourself to wrestling, or tennis, or skiing, or dance, or to a musical instrument is a longing to be disciplined for a purpose.
JOHN IRVING

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

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

Aware Constantly Reason
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

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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We permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it – and reward it in all manner of ways.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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