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We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Perspective
Lose
Loses
Often
Order
Need
Needs
Priorities
Sight

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I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
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It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
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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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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
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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 certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
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The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
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The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.
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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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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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The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
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I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
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Keep passing the open windows.
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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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My life is a reading list.
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