A part of adolescence is feelimg that there’s no one else around who’s enough like youself to understand you.
JOHN IRVINGIn 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.
More John Irving Quotes
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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.
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I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
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A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.
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We permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it – and reward it in all manner of ways.
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers – good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
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I don’t begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
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The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.
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…every study of the gods, of everyone’s gods, is a revelation of vengeance towards the innocent.
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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents’ own rule.
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
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All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let’s just leave them be. Don’t judge them. You are not superior to them – don’t put them down.
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People only ask questions when they’re ready to hear the answers.
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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.
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Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true.
JOHN IRVING