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My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.
John Irving
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Match
Coaches
Reasons
Wrong
Used
Reason
Trophies
Coach
More quotes by John Irving
Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
John Irving
When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
John Irving
Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president's particular agenda - and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
John Irving
I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
John Irving
You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
John Irving
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
If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
John Irving
(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
John Irving
It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
John Irving
I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
John Irving
If you asked me one day, I might say, Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious. If you asked me another day, I'd just say flat out, No.
John Irving
This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
John Irving
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure. It doesn't bother me if people feel that way.
John Irving
A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
John Irving
You can't say you're going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We - Americans - permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it.
John Irving
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving