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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
Ocean
Deck
Wind
Chest
Hair
Chests
Seen
Waves
Slicing
Powerful
Ship
Leaned
Face
Stood
Heading
Faces
Ships
Headings
Away
Wave
Swept

More quotes by John Irving

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It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
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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.
John Irving
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I don't begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
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I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
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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.
John Irving
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My life is a reading list.
John Irving
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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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I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
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.
John Irving
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Half my life is an act of revision.
John Irving
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… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
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The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
John Irving
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And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
John Irving
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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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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.
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