Quote

But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Take
Felt
Destruction
Famines
Believe
Certain
Beings
Indulging
Littles
Longer
Embarrass
Way
Little
Stop
Perils
Would
Might
Possible
Famine
World
Human
Less
Peril
Humans
War
Wars
Self
Death
Complete

More quotes by John Irving

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All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
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I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
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Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
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A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
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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You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
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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.
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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
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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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Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.
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For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.
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I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
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It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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Keep passing the open windows.
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
John Irving
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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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