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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
Often
Order
Need
Needs
Priorities
Sight
Perspective
Lose
Loses

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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
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I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
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I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.
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The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.
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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
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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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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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Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president's particular agenda - and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
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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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You think you have a memory but it has you!
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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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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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My life is a reading list.
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If I had to be anything, he told her, I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.
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. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
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When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
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You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
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The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
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