John Irving
John Irving
John Winslow Irving is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 March 1942
CountryUnited States of America
hate giving lessons
This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.
white judging sat
She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
being-human form humans
… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human.
inferiors
Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
people answers ready
People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
children couple divorce
It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced - when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination.
teacher love-you reading
I want to go on being a student," I told him. "I want to be a teacher. I'm just a reader," I said. "DON'T SOUND SO ASHAMED," he said. "READING IS A GIFT." "I learned it from you," I told him. "IT DOESN'T MATTER WHERE YOU LEARNED IT- IT'S A GIFT. IF YOU CARE ABOUT SOMETHING, YOU HAVE TO PROTECT IT. IF YOU'RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO FIND A WAY OF LIFE YOU LOVE, YOU HAVE TO FIND THE COURAGE TO LIVE IT.
feet needs knows
You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
children couple divorce
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.
practice promise bears
Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
reading tvs
wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.
skills people suffering
It seems to me that people who don’t learn as easily as others suffer from a kind of learning disability—there is something different about the way they comprehend unfamiliar material—but I fail to see how this disability is improved by psychiatric consultation. What seems to be lacking is a technical ability that those of us called ‘good students’ are born with. Someone should concretely study these skills and teach them. What does a shrink have to do with the process?
size dread gardener
The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.
beer drank ifs
Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax..