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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
People
Passage
Passages
Hardest
Accept
Accepting
Wind
Time
Parentheses
Love
Mattered

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Life is an X-rated soap opera.
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.
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And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.
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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.
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It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support they want someone to say, Good job.
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I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
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My brain is sending poison to my heart.
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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
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Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
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Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
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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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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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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.
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You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
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When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
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… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
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I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
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I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.
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Owen Meany believed that “coincidence” was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design – more powerful and unstoppable than the Yankee Flyer. (a train)
John Irving