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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
Drank
Wondered
Beer
Everything

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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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Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
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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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If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
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The ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
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When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
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Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
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What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
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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.
John Irving
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And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
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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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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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… 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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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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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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I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.
John Irving
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I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
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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.
John Irving