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The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
John Irving
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Obliged
Pretend
Sees
Clearly
Exist
Doe
World
More quotes by John Irving
You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
John Irving
The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
John Irving
And never forget, there is memory.
John Irving
He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
John Irving
I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
John Irving
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
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
The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.
John Irving
In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
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
Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water... remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.
John Irving
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
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.
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
No touching Baby Jesus.” “But we’re his parents!” proclaimed Mary Beth, who was being generous to include poor Joseph under this appellation. “Mary Beth,” Barb Wiggin said, “if you touch the Baby Jesus, I’m putting you in a cow costume.
John Irving
Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
John Irving
A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
John Irving
I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
John Irving
And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
John Irving
People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
John Irving
