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What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
John Irving
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Hardest
Accept
Accepting
Wind
Time
Parentheses
Love
Mattered
People
Passage
Passages
More quotes by John Irving
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.
John Irving
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
John Irving
Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
John Irving
You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
John Irving
What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
John Irving
All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
John Irving
The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
John Irving
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
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
Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
John Irving
Your memory is a monster you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving
I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like I'm writing that book review for every bad book reviewer I've ever known and it's a way of saying [thrusts a middle finger into the air] this is how you ought to do it. I like to rub their noses in it.
John Irving
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
John Irving
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
It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
John Irving