You’re nice,’ Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. ‘And you’re my oldest friend.’ But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
JOHN IRVINGYou’re nice,’ Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. ‘And you’re my oldest friend.’ But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
JOHN IRVINGWhen writing a novel, I’m not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don’t know what it is.
JOHN IRVINGI 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 IRVINGbut good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
JOHN IRVING… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
JOHN IRVINGNo one could have fathomed what a life he’d led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.
JOHN IRVINGA 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 IRVINGThere are always suicides among people who are unable to say what they mean.
JOHN IRVINGMy life is a reading list.
JOHN IRVINGWrestling 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 IRVINGIt is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
JOHN IRVINGBeing reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
JOHN IRVINGPatriotism 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.
JOHN IRVINGHe wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
JOHN IRVINGPeople 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 IRVINGI 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