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Your memory is a monster you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Think
Keeps
Thinking
Memory
Summons
Memories
Hides
Simply
Files
Forget
Recall
Away
Recalls
Doesn
Monster
Things
Monsters
More quotes by John Irving
Ever since the Christmas of 1953, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving-Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.
John Irving
I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
John Irving
A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
John Irving
Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
John Irving
I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
John Irving
When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
John Irving
Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
John Irving
The concept of writing a novel and not knowing where it's going - I don't know how to do that. Novels are plot- and character-driven, so if I don't know what becomes of people, how can I know where it should begin?
John Irving
I've always been slow but I'm even slower now. I'm more into the waiting, or I guess I'm more patient about the waiting.
John Irving
but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
John Irving
It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
John Irving
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
John Irving
In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
John Irving
There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
John Irving
It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support they want someone to say, Good job.
John Irving
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
John Irving
People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
John Irving
You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
John Irving
They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
John Irving
If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
John Irving
