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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

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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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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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Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
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If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
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Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.
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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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It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
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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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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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The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
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The object of war is to survive it.
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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?
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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
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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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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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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
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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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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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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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Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you
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