Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
JOHN IRVINGBeing reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
JOHN IRVINGI grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn’t terribly painful.
JOHN IRVINGbut good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
JOHN IRVINGThe former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.
JOHN IRVINGWhen writing a novel, I’m not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don’t know what it is.
JOHN IRVINGIf 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 IRVINGIf pride is a sin … moral pride is the greatest sin.
JOHN IRVINGThere’s nothing as scary as the future.
JOHN IRVINGWhereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.
JOHN IRVINGYour memory is a monster; you forget – it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you – and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
JOHN IRVINGPeople only ask questions when they’re ready to hear the answers.
JOHN IRVINGJust when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can’t even remember having met you
JOHN IRVINGA writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
JOHN IRVINGPatriotism 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.
JOHN IRVINGSelf-hatred is worse than loneliness.
JOHN IRVINGWhat a phrase that is: ‘that explains everything!’ I know better than to think anything ‘explains everything’ today.
JOHN IRVING