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The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Hair
Chests
Seen
Waves
Slicing
Powerful
Ship
Leaned
Face
Stood
Heading
Faces
Ships
Headings
Away
Wave
Swept
Ocean
Deck
Wind
Chest

More quotes by John Irving

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I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
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It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
John Irving
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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've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
John Irving
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I'm a worst-case scenario person. I'm only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.
John Irving
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No touching Baby Jesus.” “But we’re his parents!” proclaimed Mary Beth, who was being generous to include poor Joseph under this appellation. “Mary Beth,” Barb Wiggin said, “if you touch the Baby Jesus, I’m putting you in a cow costume.
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Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water... remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.
John Irving
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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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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
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And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
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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
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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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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
John Irving
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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.
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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You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
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Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you-because you know how to perform them-have no choice, either
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Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
John Irving