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If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Crudeness
Truly
Mankind
Love

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You think you have a memory but it has you!
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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
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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.
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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.
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It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
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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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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
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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.
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Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.
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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.
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I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.
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The object of war is to survive it.
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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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The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
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Half my life is an act of revision.
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I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
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You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
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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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Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
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