The World According To Garp

 

     What a world of illusions blossoms with the idea of “starting over.”

 

     It was his roughness many women suspected, and when he read now – even to mixed audiences – at colleges, mainly, where roughness seemed presently unfashionable – he was aware of a silent dislike. He was a man who had publicly lost his temper; he had demonstrated that he could be cruel.

 

     …he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, “You grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.” Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.

 

     …as he would learn all his life, nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

 

     It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories. 

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John Irving

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