The warm feeling you get from the "princes of Maine" passage in "The Cider House Rules" might be misplaced, as revealed by author John Irving in a 2013 interview.
John's always talking about living everything about the writing process, so writing Owen Meany's dialogue in such large letters must have sent him to heaven.
"A Prayer for Owen Meany" is John Irving's greatest novel, it feels like his most personal novel and comes the closest to reading like a novel by Dickens. I believe it was John Irving's dissatisfaction with the screenplay for that movie that caused him to, force the studio to change the name of the film (to "Simon Birch") and spurred John himself to adapt "The Cider House Rules" for the screen. In return, he won the Oscar for best screenplay adaptation, for his efforts.
