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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Nothing
Witness
Judging
Among
Maybe
White
Keenly
Stills
Determining
Still
Sat
Everything
Possibly

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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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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
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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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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
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Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
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A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
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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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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
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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 powerful wind swept his hair away from his face he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
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Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
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It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
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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'm a worst-case scenario person. I'm only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.
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I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
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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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I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.
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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
John Irving