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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Psychology
Obsessed
Stay
Obsession

More quotes by John Irving

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There's nothing as scary as the future.
John Irving
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What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
John Irving
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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
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In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
John Irving
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I'm not at all contemporary, not even modern, and the fact that I would be so quaintly attracted to that wrestling rule makes me, I suppose, seem all the more old-fashioned. I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
John Irving
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If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
John Irving
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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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Half my life is an act of revision.
John Irving
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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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I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.
John Irving
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I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
John Irving
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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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Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
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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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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There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
John Irving
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And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
John Irving
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I think that was when the headmaster realized he had lost he realized then that he was finished. Because, what could he do? Was he going to tell us to stop praying? We kept our heads bowed and we kept praying. Even as awkward as he was, the Rev. Mr. Merrill had made it clear to us that there was no end to praying for Owen Meany.
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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I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
John Irving