Quote

You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Friends
Known
Squeezing
Hands
Oldest
Someone
Friend
Must
Told
Never
Quite
Life
Hand
Nice

More quotes by John Irving

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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
John Irving
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If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
John Irving
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There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
John Irving
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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
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I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
John Irving
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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
John Irving
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Life is an X-rated soap opera.
John Irving
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Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.
John Irving
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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
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Owen Meany believed that “coincidence” was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design – more powerful and unstoppable than the Yankee Flyer. (a train)
John Irving
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I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
John Irving
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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
John Irving
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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
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
John Irving
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The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.
John Irving
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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
John Irving
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The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.
John Irving