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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Grownups
Till
Perfect
Hands
Kids
People

More quotes by John Irving

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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.
John Irving
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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
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
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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Keep passing the open windows.
John Irving
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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
John Irving
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If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
John Irving
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
John Irving
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I don't begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
John Irving
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
John Irving
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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
John Irving
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
John Irving
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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.
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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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
John Irving
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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
John Irving
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(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
John Irving
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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