It’s a no-win argument – that business of what we’re born with and what our environment does to us. And it’s a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
JOHN IRVINGI never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
More John Irving Quotes
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It’s not right to hurt or deceive someone who’s already been hurt and deceived.
JOHN IRVING -
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
JOHN IRVING -
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
JOHN IRVING -
When you legislate personal belief, you’re in violation of freedom of religion.
JOHN IRVING -
I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
JOHN IRVING -
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 -
My life is a reading list.
JOHN IRVING -
Our memory is a monster; you forget it – it does not.
JOHN IRVING -
Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer’s irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn’t reading.
JOHN IRVING -
I suppose I’m proudest of my novels for what’s imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
JOHN IRVING -
I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
JOHN IRVING -
How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
JOHN IRVING -
When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it – rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
JOHN IRVING -
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person – you have to know the difference.
JOHN IRVING -
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