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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Beer
Everything
Drank
Wondered

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There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
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And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.
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The concept of writing a novel and not knowing where it's going - I don't know how to do that. Novels are plot- and character-driven, so if I don't know what becomes of people, how can I know where it should begin?
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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
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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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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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Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
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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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… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
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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.
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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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Keep passing the open windows.
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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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Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
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If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
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It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.
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I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.
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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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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
John Irving