A Soldier Once :: JOHN IRVING – New York Times:
At the ages of 14 and 15, I had read “Great Expectations” twice — Dickens made me want to be a writer — but it was reading “The Tin Drum” at 19 and 20 that showed me how. It was Günter Grass who demonstrated that it was possible to be a living writer who wrote with Dickens’s full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language. Grass wrote with fury, love, derision, slapstick, pathos — all with an unforgiving conscience.
![The enchanted fountain [explored 2026/10/29]](https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/55558298283_c3e6c29215_s.jpg "The enchanted fountain [explored 2026/10/29]")
