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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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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Thinking
Actor
Writer
Pretty
Actors
Business
Better
Thick
Going
Skin
Think
Skins

More quotes by John Irving

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I don't begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
John Irving
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If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
John Irving
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
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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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
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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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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
John Irving
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Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.
John Irving
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one. But we are a country - USA - that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.
John Irving
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I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
John Irving
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In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.
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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Wrestling was my first success, the first thing that confirmed that I could be good at anything. Devoting yourself to wrestling, or tennis, or skiing, or dance, or to a musical instrument is a longing to be disciplined for a purpose.
John Irving
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I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
John Irving
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Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?
John Irving
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I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.
John Irving
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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
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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
John Irving
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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
John Irving
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It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.
John Irving