Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president’s particular agenda – and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
JOHN IRVINGPatriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president’s particular agenda – and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
JOHN IRVINGI never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
JOHN IRVINGA writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
JOHN IRVINGMy life is a reading list.
JOHN IRVINGThe gardener had a dread of small women; he’d always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.
JOHN IRVINGO God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
JOHN IRVINGWhen Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
JOHN IRVING…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.
JOHN IRVINGHe was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
JOHN IRVINGIf 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.
JOHN IRVINGLife is serious but art is fun!
JOHN IRVINGWhat 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 IRVINGAs 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 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.
JOHN IRVINGHe also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.
JOHN IRVINGHow we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
JOHN IRVING