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If pride is a sin … moral pride is the greatest sin.

John Irving

…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 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
There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
JOHN IRVING

Four Negotiation Years
I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
JOHN IRVING

Dying Finding Student Yourself
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
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.
JOHN IRVING

Alive Hero Trying
I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
JOHN IRVING

Nervous Not Afraid People
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
JOHN IRVING

Dark Mom Mother
A writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
JOHN IRVING

Jobs Memories Writing
Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.
JOHN IRVING

Majority People Population
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
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.
JOHN IRVING

Agendas Blind Presidential
My life is a reading list.
JOHN IRVING

Life Lists Reading
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
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
Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
JOHN IRVING

Creative Maps Writing

If pride is a sin … moral pride is the greatest sin.

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If pride is a sin … moral pride is the greatest sin.

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