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There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Quickly
Novel
Write
Reason
Writing

More quotes by 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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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
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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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I'm not a movie person. They're collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.
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There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.
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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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.
John Irving
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There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
John Irving
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I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
John Irving
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Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you-because you know how to perform them-have no choice, either
John Irving
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Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
John Irving
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My brain is sending poison to my heart.
John Irving
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
John Irving
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I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
John Irving
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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
John Irving
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The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
John Irving
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I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
John Irving
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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've always been slow but I'm even slower now. I'm more into the waiting, or I guess I'm more patient about the waiting.
John Irving