A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
John IrvingRead
If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of effort and care in creating something meaningful, whether in cooking, writing, or love.
John Irving draws a parallel between cooking and other creative endeavors like writing and love, highlighting that while careful preparation and good ingredients can lead to success in cooking, the same cannot always be said for writing and relationships. He suggests that cooking can serve as a grounding and stabilizing activity for those who are trying hard, offering a tangible sense of accomplishment even when other aspects of life may yield less satisfying results.
Themes
CookingWritingLoveEffortSanity
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about finding balance in life.
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.
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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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