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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Hard
Great
Work
Make
Life
Serious
Art

More quotes by John Irving

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Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you-because you know how to perform them-have no choice, either
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
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You think you have a memory but it has you!
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
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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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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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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
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And never forget, there is memory.
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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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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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The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
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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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Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
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(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
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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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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
John Irving