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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
Trophies
Coach
Match
Coaches
Reasons
Wrong
Used
Reason

More quotes by John Irving

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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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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.
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My life is a reading list.
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Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
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I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
John Irving
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I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
John Irving
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What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
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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.
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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them...they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.
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.
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.
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Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.
John Irving
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You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
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Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
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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.
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