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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
Orphans
Noted
Orphan
Rare
Adults
Among
Happiness
Wilbur
Delirious

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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.
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I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
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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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The object of war is to survive it.
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What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
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… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
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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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All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
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You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
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Life is an X-rated soap opera.
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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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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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Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.
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I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
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