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People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Questions
Ready
Answers
Hear
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More quotes by John Irving

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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.
John Irving
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And never forget, there is memory.
John Irving
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Keep passing the open windows.
John Irving
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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
John Irving
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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
John Irving
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We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
John Irving
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So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
John Irving
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you
John Irving
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I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
John Irving
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I'm not a movie person. They're collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.
John Irving
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
John Irving
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Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water... remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.
John Irving
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You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
John Irving
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one. But we are a country - USA - that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.
John Irving
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There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
John Irving
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In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
John Irving
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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
John Irving
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Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
John Irving