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I’ve always preferred writing in longhand. I’ve always written first drafts in longhand.

John Irving

Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.
JOHN IRVING

Practice Religious Two
There’s nothing as scary as the future.
JOHN IRVING

Future Nothing Scary
I’m not a movie person. They’re collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.
JOHN IRVING

Collaboration Compromise Heart
The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.
JOHN IRVING

Architecture Crafts Writing
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
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 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
If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.
JOHN IRVING

Caricatures Enough Long
I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
JOHN IRVING

Believe Children Church
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
He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
JOHN IRVING

Coincidence Novel Young
Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
JOHN IRVING

Scary Writing
Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
JOHN IRVING

Condescend Inferiors People
Life is serious but art is fun!
JOHN IRVING

Art Fun Life
I don’t begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
JOHN IRVING

Finals Knowing Usually Voice
Death, it seems,” Garp wrote, “does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.
JOHN IRVING

Death Dramatic Indulgent Waiting

I’ve always preferred writing in longhand. I’ve always written first drafts in longhand.

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I’ve always preferred writing in longhand. I’ve always written first drafts in longhand.

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