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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Fingers
Mom
Hold
Needed
Hand
Dark
Mother
Burns
Hands
Jack

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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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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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Life is an X-rated soap opera.
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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.
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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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Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
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Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
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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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A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.
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Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
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… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
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No touching Baby Jesus.” “But we’re his parents!” proclaimed Mary Beth, who was being generous to include poor Joseph under this appellation. “Mary Beth,” Barb Wiggin said, “if you touch the Baby Jesus, I’m putting you in a cow costume.
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. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
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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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Your memory is a monster you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory but it has you!
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I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand-in addition to how much it slows you down-is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.
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My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.
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My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
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