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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
White
Keenly
Stills
Determining
Still
Sat
Everything
Possibly
Nothing
Witness
Judging
Among
Maybe

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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
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When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
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It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
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Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
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It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
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I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.
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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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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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You don't have to be in the habit of going to church to listen to such a literary minister you don't have to be a believer to be moved by Mr. Buechner's faith.
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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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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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If you asked me one day, I might say, Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious. If you asked me another day, I'd just say flat out, No.
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But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.
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When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
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I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
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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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I'm not at all contemporary, not even modern, and the fact that I would be so quaintly attracted to that wrestling rule makes me, I suppose, seem all the more old-fashioned. I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
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It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
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There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
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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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