I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
JOHN IRVINGPlot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
More John Irving Quotes
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
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The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything.
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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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He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
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If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.
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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
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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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It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don’t expect me to change.
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There’s nothing as scary as the future.
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers – good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
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People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
JOHN IRVING -
Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
JOHN IRVING -
What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman’s freedom of choice, too.
JOHN IRVING -
What a phrase that is: ‘that explains everything!’ I know better than to think anything ‘explains everything’ today.
JOHN IRVING -
They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other…. or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
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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 -
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person – you have to know the difference.
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Death, it seems,” Garp wrote, “does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.
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So, I don’t work in terms of real time. I don’t work in a timely fashion.
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 -
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
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In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us — not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.
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What 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 IRVING -
Keep passing the open windows.
JOHN IRVING -
I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.
JOHN IRVING