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
growing-up doors long
...I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar-you live next door to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace.
home dying needs
Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.
thinking today phrases
What a phrase that is: 'that explains everything!' I know better than to think anything 'explains everything' today.
wrestling tennis musical
Wrestling was my first success, the first thing that confirmed that I could be good at anything. Devoting yourself to wrestling, or tennis, or skiing, or dance, or to a musical instrument is a longing to be disciplined for a purpose.
writing wrestling hard-work
Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
childhood fancy grows
Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.
writing stories want
When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
thinking hymns funeral
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.
exhausting seventeen knows
It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
lovers
You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
small-changes half revision
Half my life is an act of revision; more than half the act is performed with small changes.
abortion choices needs
Here is the trap you are in.... And it's not my trap—I haven't trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to perform them—have no choice, either. What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too. If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice—and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you're trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims, and so are you.
tattoo men giving
You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
running memorable thinking
Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you