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 IrvingIf we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough.
John IrvingThis mannerism of what he'd seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people—because, surely, Wally was nice—would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At. St. Cloud's, criticism was plainer—and harder, if not impossible, to conceal.
John IrvingTags: society criticism gossip
I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye.
John IrvingKnow the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.
John IrvingWriting a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties."
(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)
Tags: writing novels craft victims casualties
Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either."
(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)
Tags: science freud sigmund-freud novelists psychiatrists
ARE THEY ESPECIALLY WILD?
John IrvingTags: humor
He had heard her say, so many times, that a society that approved of making abortion illegal was a society that approved of violence against women; that making abortion illegal was simply a sanctimonious, self-righteous form of violence against women- it was just another way of legalizing violence against women, Nurse Caroline would say.
John IrvingTags: freedom-of-choice abortion womens-rights mysogyny
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.
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