As it was, things went from bad to worse, as they often will when amateurs are involved in an activity that they perform in bad temper – or in a hurry.
JOHN IRVINGIf you asked me one day, I might say, “Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious.” If you asked me another day, I’d just say flat out, “No.”
More John Irving Quotes
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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person – you have to know the difference.
JOHN IRVING -
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
JOHN IRVING -
Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
JOHN IRVING -
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
JOHN IRVING -
Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
JOHN IRVING -
Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
JOHN IRVING -
The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.
JOHN IRVING -
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 -
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 -
No one could have fathomed what a life he’d led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.
JOHN IRVING -
…every study of the gods, of everyone’s gods, is a revelation of vengeance towards the innocent.
JOHN IRVING -
In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
JOHN IRVING -
… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
JOHN IRVING -
It’s not right to hurt or deceive someone who’s already been hurt and deceived.
JOHN IRVING -
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 IRVING