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There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Years
Negotiation
Straightforward
Four
Year

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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
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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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In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
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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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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've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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Wrestling was my first success, the first thing that confirmed that I could be good at anything. Devoting yourself to wrestling, or tennis, or skiing, or dance, or to a musical instrument is a longing to be disciplined for a purpose.
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It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
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I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
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The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.
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I've always been slow but I'm even slower now. I'm more into the waiting, or I guess I'm more patient about the waiting.
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Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
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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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I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you
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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Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
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