Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
JOHN IRVINGYou 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.
More John Irving Quotes
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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
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but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
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Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true.
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I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I’ve seen in the country since John Kennedy.
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A writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
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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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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.
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There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
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There’s nothing as scary as the future.
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The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.
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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.
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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.
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They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
JOHN IRVING -
Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents’ own rule.
JOHN IRVING