There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
JOHN IRVINGI will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.
More John Irving Quotes
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What a phrase that is: ‘that explains everything!’ I know better than to think anything ‘explains everything’ today.
JOHN IRVING -
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 -
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
JOHN IRVING -
Life is an X-rated soap opera.
JOHN IRVING -
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
JOHN IRVING -
Keep passing the open windows.
JOHN IRVING -
Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
JOHN IRVING -
They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
JOHN IRVING -
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 -
The ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
JOHN IRVING -
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 -
Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean – make sure they know what they mean!
JOHN IRVING -
…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.
JOHN IRVING -
So, I don’t work in terms of real time. I don’t work in a timely fashion.
JOHN IRVING -
Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
JOHN IRVING