A Quote by John Irving
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.
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Going back to school is like going back in time. Immediately, for better or for worse, you must give up a little piece of your autonomy in order to become part of the group. And every group, of course, has its hierarchies and rules- spoken and unspoken. It is like learning to live once again in a family- which, of course, is the setting where all learning begins.
I think that every day is a learning experience. I mean, every time I go to a school I learn something else from a teacher or learn something else from a student, I learn something else from a parent. There's so much to know when you talk about education.
A problem with school is that you often become what you study. If you study, let say cooking, you become a chef. If you study law, you become an attorney, and a study of auto mechanics makes you mechanics. The mistake in becoming what you study is that, too many people forget to mind their own business. They spend their lives minding someone else's business and making that person rich
As someone who has spent a lot of her career as an investigative reporter, I'll confess that a frustration of mine has always been that so much investigative journalism involves a dissection of events in the past.
I have to get three pages done every day, and there's usually a point about 150 pages in where everything falls apart, where all the plans are for naught. The book has become something else, and I have a nervous breakdown, and then I submit to what the book has become, and I keep going, and that's a terrible and then a great time.
When I go to a great movie, I can live somebody else's life a little bit for a while. I can walk in somebody else's shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.
I live very normally, I go out with my friends, we go to the movies, I queue, we go to restaurants. Then if something happens to remind me that I'm an actress then I become a little different and things become a little heavy.
You know when I was a high school student I wasn't a very good student. Upon graduation we were asked if we would become a full working adult or go to university. I decided to go to film school and still to this day I try to avoid being a full working adult.
I remember when I was young, in the north, they went to the grammar school little children: they came from thence great lubbers: always learning, and little profiting: learning without book everything, understanding within the book little or nothing.
It's hard no to work, so I find a way to put myself back to work. And I think it's important, in between projects, for me to sit down with who I've just become and allow her to continue to evolve and find a home inside me before I go and become somebody else. But I think I also need to learn to relax and not prepare too much, just enjoy life. I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don't have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on me.
In the biographical novel, there's only one person involved. I, the author, spend two to five years becoming the main character. I do that so by the time you get to the bottom of Page 2 or 3, you forget your name, where you live, your profession and the year it is. You become the main character of the book. You live the book.
Once you become successful, people know where you live, the type of house you live in, the kind of car you drive, the clothes you wear, and so it would be patronising to go and talk like a welder. Welding's a mystery to me now. You can't go back, your life changes every day.
If you read a book about school - someone else's book - you always translate it into your own school experiences. It's describing the student: he's bewildered and lost in a large crowd in a university classroom. You'll visualize that from your own experiences. So, everything you know is what you're really writing.
I'm excited about going back to 'Today,' but, at odd moments, I'll grit my teeth in anxiety. I feel like a student before the start of school. I've got my new shoes and my book bag, but I'm not sure I'll remember how to do trigonometry. During my maternity leave, I haven't used many words of more than one syllable.
How can we help a child change from undependable to dependable, from a mediocre student to a capable student, from someone who won't amount to very much to someone who will count for something. The answer is at once both simple and complicated: We treat a child as if he already is what we would like him to become.
I want to be successful and I want people to hear the music and I want to make money at it, but if it isn't what you do, eventually it seems like that will cause you to not be able to do what you do. If you did that for a couple years, you would just become someone else, which is fine, I guess...but I don't want to become someone else. I want to do what I enjoy and what feels right.
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