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It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
John Irving
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Business
Boring
Doe
Argument
Birth
Mystery
Growth
Simplifies
Environment
Simplify
Winning
Attend
Born
Mysteries
More quotes by John Irving
You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
John Irving
My brain is sending poison to my heart.
John Irving
Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!
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
My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!
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
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
In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
John Irving
My life is a reading list.
John Irving
I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
John Irving
You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
John Irving
Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
John Irving
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
The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
John Irving
I'm not a movie person. They're collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.
John Irving
I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
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
