A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
John IrvingRead
With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Reading brings continuous learning and empathy through understanding others' experiences.
This quote emphasizes how reading fosters ongoing education and empathy. When we read books, we not only gain knowledge and insights like a student or a reporter but also develop a deeper understanding of diverse perspectives and experiences, enabling us to walk in someone else's shoes.
Themes
ReadingLearningEmpathyBooksUnderstanding
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of literature in personal growth.
More from John Irving
All quotes →No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen...You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.
John IrvingRead
It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I'm always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them.
John IrvingRead
It is an important distinction to note that she looked not only as if she had taken good care of herself, but that she had good reason to have done so. (...) She looked to be in such total possession of her life that only the most confident men could continue to look at her if she looked back at them. Even in bus stations, she was a woman who was stared at only until she looked back.
John IrvingRead
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
John IrvingRead
I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.
John IrvingRead
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