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The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.

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
Midst
Elaborate
Protect
Couples
Couple
Civility
Journey
Priority
Child
Arrangements
Often
Divorce
Order
Maintain
Children
Priorities
Professed

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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
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It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
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but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.
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We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
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There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.
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If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
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I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
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My life is a reading list.
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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
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Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.
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Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you-because you know how to perform them-have no choice, either
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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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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
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