A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
John IrvingRead
If 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.
Interpretation
The quote critiques how television portrays death in a glamorous way, making life seem less valuable.
John Irving's quote reflects on the way television often romanticizes death, suggesting that its portrayal can make life feel unfulfilling or mundane by comparison. This sentiment implies that the way media presents death can lead the living to perceive their existence as lacking, overshadowing the value of life itself.
In practice
In a speech about the impact of media on mental health.
A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What may appear as truth to one person will often appear as untruth to another person. But that need not worry the seeker. When there is honest effort, it will be realised that what appears to be different truths are like apparently different countless leaves of the same tree.
Memoirs are the backstairs of history.
Curtailment of free speech is rationalized on grounds that a more compelling American tradition forbids criticism of the government when the nation is at war... Nothing can be more destructive of our fundamental democratic traditions than the vicious effort to silence dissenters.
I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
The message of Easter is that God's new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you're now invited to belong to it.
Having a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing seems to me to be one of the most basic principles that you can adopt to contribute to individual and world peace.
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