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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don’t have one. But we are a country – USA – that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.

John Irving

You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
JOHN IRVING

Obsessed Obsession Psychology
He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
JOHN IRVING

Coincidence Novel Young
Wrestling was my first success, the first thing that confirmed that I could be good at anything. Devoting yourself to wrestling, or tennis, or skiing, or dance, or to a musical instrument is a longing to be disciplined for a purpose.
JOHN IRVING

Musical Tennis Wrestling
So, I don’t work in terms of real time. I don’t work in a timely fashion.
JOHN IRVING

Fashion Real Term Work
Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.
JOHN IRVING

Imagine Remember Stories
There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
JOHN IRVING

Aware Constantly Reason
No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin – only four years older than I am – everything, or what little I could discover about him.
JOHN IRVING

Cousin Father Years
The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.
JOHN IRVING

Architecture Crafts Writing
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
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
JOHN IRVING

Beginning Ends Grows Growth
You can’t learn everything you need to know legally.
JOHN IRVING

Feet Knows Needs
No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen…You shouldn’t have a baby if there’s no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.
JOHN IRVING

Baby Hands Moving
I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them…they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.
JOHN IRVING

Funeral Hymns Thinking
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
…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 IRVING

Doors Growing Long
O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
JOHN IRVING

Asking Giving Please

If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don’t have one. But we are a country – USA – that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.

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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don’t have one. But we are a country – USA – that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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