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I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Facts
Nothing
Console
Take
Sympathy
People
Behave
Seriously
Laughter
Therefore
Fact

More quotes by 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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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
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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!
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My life is a reading list.
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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.
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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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Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
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The object of war is to survive it.
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And never forget, there is memory.
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Half my life is an act of revision.
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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
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Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
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If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
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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.
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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.
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
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Keep passing the open windows.
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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
John Irving