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.
John IrvingThis is a writerโs lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.
John IrvingIf watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.
John IrvingWhat is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
John Irving