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And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Find
Hasn
Time
Capacity
Like
Necessary
Spend
Writer
Alone
Part
Better
Diminished

More quotes by John Irving

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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
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You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
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You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life
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but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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 characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.
John Irving
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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
John Irving
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Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
John Irving
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For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.
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I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
John Irving
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And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
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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.
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It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
John Irving
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The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.
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You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
John Irving
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I'm a worst-case scenario person. I'm only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.
John Irving
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
John Irving