When you legislate personal belief, you’re in violation of freedom of religion.
JOHN IRVINGNo one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen…You shouldn’t have a baby if there’s no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.
More John Irving Quotes
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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 -
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.
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No one could have fathomed what a life he’d led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.
JOHN IRVING -
I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn’t terribly painful.
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…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.
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Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
JOHN IRVING -
It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
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The lie, of course, is more interesting.
JOHN IRVING -
The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.
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.
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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.
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don’t have one. But we are a country – USA – that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.
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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents’ own rule.
JOHN IRVING -
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.
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Your memory is a monster; you forget – it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you – and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
JOHN IRVING