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
motivation stronger injustice
A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
mean past people
When people say that German or any other language is romantic... all they really mean is that they've enjoyed a past in the language
writing creative plot
Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
war objects
The object of war is to survive it.
loneliness comforting combat
Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
writing letdowns seems
Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
falling-in-love fall love-is
But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.
art experts appearance
She was an expert at the art of sudden appearance.
important important-things exhausting
Being wrong about important things is exhausting.
lying interesting courses
The lie, of course, is more interesting.
ice issues bigs
Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.
moving hampshire hotel
Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
optimism risk quality
He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
night journey gone
I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield) “But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.