Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

For you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm. This is Michael Silverblatt. Today my guest is John Irving,

the author most recently of trying to save Piggy's Need, a miscellany in the true sense of

the word. It's composed of memoirs, fiction, and critical homages to favorite writers,

or at least two favorite writers, Dickens and Gunter Gras. It's been brought to us in paperback by

Ballantyne. Need I tell you that he is the author as well of a son of the circus, a prayer for

Owen Meaney, the cider house rules, the Owen Meany, the Cider House Rules,

the Hotel New Hampshire, the World According to Garp, the 158-pound marriage, and a miracle

that happened in my life when I was in college, a book called The Water Method Man, which was

sent to me by the publisher and which I read. In Marvel, I got to know John Irving two books before everyone else did,

and the first book was setting Free the Bears.

Now, in the collection trying to save Piggy's Need,

you say something thrilling.

You say that you have no taste for what non-writers call good and bad taste.

And that's the thrilling salvation of all of these books, that they begin at the place where

distinctions like that become meaningless. Can you speak about that? Well, it seems to me that a so-called good taste when it's applied to literature is usually the jurisdiction of school boards or parent groups who are opposed to books being taught to their children,

which are probably the only books their children really should or must read.

It has to me such a sensorial force,

...