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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

John Irving

How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
JOHN IRVING

Eyes Love People Things
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.
JOHN IRVING

Minutes Way Writing
but writers, Garp knew, were just observers – good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
JOHN IRVING

Behavior Humans Ruthless
This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
JOHN IRVING

Centered Religion Self
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
O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
JOHN IRVING

Asking Giving Please
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
JOHN IRVING

Art Hard Work Serious
Our memory is a monster; you forget it – it does not.
JOHN IRVING

Doe Memories Monsters
The gardener had a dread of small women; he’d always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.
JOHN IRVING

Dread Gardener Size
Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
JOHN IRVING

Scary Writing
A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.
JOHN IRVING

Boiled Life Sentences
It’s not right to hurt or deceive someone who’s already been hurt and deceived.
JOHN IRVING

Deceived Deceiving Hurt
The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
JOHN IRVING

Hair Ocean Powerful
If you asked me one day, I might say, “Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious.” If you asked me another day, I’d just say flat out, “No.”
JOHN IRVING

Another Day Religious
My life is a reading list.
JOHN IRVING

Life Lists Reading
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

Love People Wind

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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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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