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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

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When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
John Irving
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So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
John Irving
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If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
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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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People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
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
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In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
John Irving
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I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand-in addition to how much it slows you down-is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.
John Irving
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Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
John Irving
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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.
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.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
John Irving
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Half my life is an act of revision.
John Irving
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
John Irving
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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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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
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A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.
John Irving
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All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
John Irving