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
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?
father grandmother world
In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
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..
thinking together kind
They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
writing dark matter
Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.
men half handsome
A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.
adults orphan delirious
Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
reason no-reason
There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
writing reason should
There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
believe winning men
Here in St. Cloud’s,” Dr. Larch wrote, “ I have been given the choice of playing God or leaving practically everything up to chance. It is my experience that practically everything is left up to chance much of the time; men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God – we should seize those moments. There won’t be may
powerful ocean wind
The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
clouds long saint
Grant us safe lodging, and holy rest,” Mrs. Grogan was saying, “and peace at last.” Amen, thought Wilbur Larch, the Saint of St. Cloud’s, who was seventy-something, and an ether addict, and who felt that he’d come a long way and still had a long way to go.
heart normal drs
… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.