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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

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

Nervous Not Afraid People
You’re nice,’ Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. ‘And you’re my oldest friend.’ But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
JOHN IRVING

Hands Nice Squeezing
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
Life is an X-rated soap opera.
JOHN IRVING

Life Opera Soap
Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
JOHN IRVING

Scary Writing
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.
JOHN IRVING

Childhood Events Loss
Our memory is a monster; you forget it – it does not.
JOHN IRVING

Doe Memories Monsters
He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
JOHN IRVING

Lessons Moral
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
I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
JOHN IRVING

Dying Finding Student Yourself
Keep passing the open windows.
JOHN IRVING

Depression Encouraging Life
I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.
JOHN IRVING

Civilization Perception Years
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
In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
JOHN IRVING

Energy Father Grandmother
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

Be Kind Bird Rhinos
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

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.

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Popular Authors

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