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I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn’t terribly painful.

John Irving

But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.
JOHN IRVING

Busy People Thinking
Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.
JOHN IRVING

Imagine Remember Stories
When writing a novel, I’m not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don’t know what it is.
JOHN IRVING

Enough Smart Writing
Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.
JOHN IRVING

Practice Religious Two
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

Memories Monsters Thinking
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

Decision Finals Unnecessarily
When you legislate personal belief, you’re in violation of freedom of religion.
JOHN IRVING

Belief Freedom Religion Violation
My brain is sending poison to my heart.
JOHN IRVING

Brain Heart Poison
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

Love Reason Writing
Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
JOHN IRVING

Condescend Inferiors People
I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
JOHN IRVING

Nervous Not Afraid People
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
JOHN IRVING

Art Hard Work Serious
A part of adolescence is feelimg that there’s no one else around who’s enough like youself to understand you.
JOHN IRVING

Adolescence Enough Like
I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
JOHN IRVING

Next Novel Writing
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
JOHN IRVING

Hatred Loneliness Self
A writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
JOHN IRVING

Jobs Memories Writing

I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn’t terribly painful.

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I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn’t terribly painful.

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Popular Authors

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