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I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
John Irving
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Make
Mouths
Like
Please
Boys
Hand
Poor
Sound
Describe
Hands
Cover
Ever
Mouth
More quotes by John Irving
I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
John Irving
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.
John Irving
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
John Irving
A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.
John Irving
but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
John Irving
People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
And never forget, there is memory.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
John Irving
Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
John Irving
A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
John Irving
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
John Irving
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
John Irving
Life is an X-rated soap opera.
John Irving
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.
John Irving