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Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Adults
Among
Happiness
Wilbur
Delirious
Orphans
Noted
Orphan
Rare

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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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I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
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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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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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If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
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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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Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.
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For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.
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The ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
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Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
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Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
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Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
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I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
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It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.
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My brain is sending poison to my heart.
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In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
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