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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
Made
Wild
Owen
Good
Inspired
Calamities
Amazing
Philosophies
Philosophy
Fright
Friends
Charged
Sense
Calamity
Night
Supportive
Nothing
Perfectly
Imaginings

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He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
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Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
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When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.
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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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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.
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Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you
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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
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But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.
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My life is a reading list.
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Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.
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If you asked me one day, I might say, Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious. If you asked me another day, I'd just say flat out, No.
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There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
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It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.
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The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
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The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
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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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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.
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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
John Irving