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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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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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And never forget, there is memory.
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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
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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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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.
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So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
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It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
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I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.
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The concept of writing a novel and not knowing where it's going - I don't know how to do that. Novels are plot- and character-driven, so if I don't know what becomes of people, how can I know where it should begin?
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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
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What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
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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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It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
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The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
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It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support they want someone to say, Good job.
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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
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