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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.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Accepting
Call
Common
Heart
Ache
Would
Symptoms
Life
Tried
Accept
Normal

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. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
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Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
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And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.
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Your memory is a monster you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory but it has you!
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You think you have a memory but it has you!
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
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When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
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I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand-in addition to how much it slows you down-is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
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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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In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.
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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.
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He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
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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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If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
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There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
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