THERE’S NO MONKEY BUSINESS ABOUT THIS ELECTION,’ he told the voters. ‘IF YOU’RE ENOUGH OF AN ASSHOLE TO VOTE FOR NIXON, YOUR DUMB VOTE WILL BE COUNTED––JUST LIKE ANYBODY ELSE!
JOHN IRVINGTHERE’S NO MONKEY BUSINESS ABOUT THIS ELECTION,’ he told the voters. ‘IF YOU’RE ENOUGH OF AN ASSHOLE TO VOTE FOR NIXON, YOUR DUMB VOTE WILL BE COUNTED––JUST LIKE ANYBODY ELSE!
JOHN IRVINGHe wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
JOHN IRVINGLife is serious but art is fun!
JOHN IRVINGOur memory is a monster; you forget it – it does not.
JOHN IRVINGLife forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
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 IRVINGbut writers, Garp knew, were just observers – good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
JOHN IRVINGWhen you legislate personal belief, you’re in violation of freedom of religion.
JOHN IRVINGNearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
JOHN IRVINGAnd when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won’t forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
JOHN IRVINGThe gardener had a dread of small women; he’d always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.
JOHN IRVINGThus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.
JOHN IRVINGPeople only ask questions when they’re ready to hear the answers.
JOHN IRVINGI’ve always preferred writing in longhand. I’ve always written first drafts in longhand.
JOHN IRVINGMaybe 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 IRVINGYou 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