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You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Given
Take
Many
Even
Every
World
Opportunities
Stop
Opportunity

More quotes by John Irving

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It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.
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Half my life is an act of revision.
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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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When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
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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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Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.
John Irving
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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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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
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They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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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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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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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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When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
John Irving
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I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.
John Irving
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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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I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
John Irving
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
John Irving