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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.

John Irving

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

Stories Victim Writing
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
JOHN IRVING

Dark Mom Mother
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
JOHN IRVING

Friend Good Meany Owen Supportive
He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
JOHN IRVING

Lessons Moral
Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true.
JOHN IRVING

Care Rumor Stories
I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I’ve seen in the country since John Kennedy.
JOHN IRVING

Country Hopeful Thinking
A writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
JOHN IRVING

Jobs Memories Writing
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.
JOHN IRVING

Agendas Blind Presidential
Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer’s irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn’t reading.
JOHN IRVING

Cancer Reading Real
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
There’s nothing as scary as the future.
JOHN IRVING

Future Nothing Scary
The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.
JOHN IRVING

Architecture Crafts 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
Whereas 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 IRVING

Majority People Population
They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
JOHN IRVING

Awkward Procedures Regret
Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents’ own rule.
JOHN IRVING

Children Moments Parent

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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