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Half my life is an act of revision.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Half
Writing
Life
Revision

More quotes by John Irving

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All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
John Irving
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My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!
John Irving
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… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
John Irving
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The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
John Irving
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
John Irving
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
John Irving
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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
John Irving
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
John Irving
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When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
John Irving
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I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
John Irving
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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
John Irving
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Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
John Irving
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You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
John Irving
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I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
John Irving
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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
John Irving
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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
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The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
John Irving
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The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
John Irving
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I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
John Irving
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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
John Irving