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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person – you have to know the difference.

John Irving

What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman’s freedom of choice, too.
JOHN IRVING

Abortion Choice Choices Freedom
The lie, of course, is more interesting.
JOHN IRVING

Courses Interesting Lying
The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.
JOHN IRVING

Architecture Crafts Writing
A novel is a piece of architecture. It’s not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It’s a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
JOHN IRVING

Diaries Floor Wall Writing
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
JOHN IRVING

Art Hard Work Serious
I suppose I’m proudest of my novels for what’s imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
JOHN IRVING

Imagination Interesting Thinking
My life is a reading list.
JOHN IRVING

Life Lists Reading
I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, “I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure.” It doesn’t bother me if people feel that way.
JOHN IRVING

Book People Procedure Way
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
JOHN IRVING

Hatred Loneliness Self
It’s a no-win argument – that business of what we’re born with and what our environment does to us. And it’s a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
JOHN IRVING

Environment Growth Winning
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
JOHN IRVING

Finished Process Product
In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.
JOHN IRVING

Memorable Thinking Trying
The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.
JOHN IRVING

Husband Oxygen Thinking
Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
JOHN IRVING

Die Dies Everybody
Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents’ own rule.
JOHN IRVING

Children Moments Parent
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

The main character and the most important character are not always the same person – you have to know the difference.

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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person – you have to know the difference.

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Popular Authors

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