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I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them...they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.
John Irving
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Part
Funeral
Everything
Repeat
Feel
Repeats
Feels
Acceptable
Make
Service
Think
Often
Thinking
Makes
Nature
Hymns
More quotes by John Irving
I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.
John Irving
The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.
John Irving
It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
John Irving
Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.
John Irving
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
The concept of writing a novel and not knowing where it's going - I don't know how to do that. Novels are plot- and character-driven, so if I don't know what becomes of people, how can I know where it should begin?
John Irving
It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
John Irving
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
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
John Irving
You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
John Irving
If I had to be anything, he told her, I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.
John Irving
I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
John Irving
Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water... remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.
John Irving
The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
John Irving
I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
John Irving
When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
John Irving
It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
John Irving
Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
John Irving
I've always been slow but I'm even slower now. I'm more into the waiting, or I guess I'm more patient about the waiting.
John Irving
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
John Irving