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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
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Giving
Novel
Ungenerous
Never
Relationship
Prizes
People
Situation
Prize
Interest
Message
Social
Interests
Political
Messages
Character
Begin
Give
Toward
More quotes by John Irving
Ever since the Christmas of 1953, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving-Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.
John Irving
I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
John Irving
It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving
And never forget, there is memory.
John Irving
Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
John Irving
There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
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
It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
John Irving
The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
John Irving
If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
John Irving
I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
John Irving
I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
John Irving
(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
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
Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
John Irving
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
When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
John Irving
I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
John Irving
This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
John Irving
