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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

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Sense
Calamity
Night
Supportive
Nothing
Perfectly
Imaginings
Made
Wild
Owen
Good
Inspired
Calamities
Amazing
Philosophies
Philosophy
Fright
Friends
Charged

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Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president's particular agenda - and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
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The concept of writing a novel and not knowing where it's going - I don't know how to do that. Novels are plot- and character-driven, so if I don't know what becomes of people, how can I know where it should begin?
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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
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They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
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Life is an X-rated soap opera.
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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
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You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
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I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
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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.
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All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
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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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Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.
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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
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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.
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I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.
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The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.
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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
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