How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
JOHN IRVINGWriting a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
More John Irving Quotes
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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.
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Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
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Our memory is a monster; you forget it – it does not.
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I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
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You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
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Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president’s particular agenda – and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
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You can’t say you’re going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We – Americans – permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it.
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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents’ own rule.
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You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I’m going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life
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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
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When writing a novel, I’m not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don’t know what it is.
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No one could have fathomed what a life he’d led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.
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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.
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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.
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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