Quote

You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Give
Giving
Leaping
Trying
Decipher
Men
Tattoos
Headache
Tattoo
Naked
Bed

More quotes by 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
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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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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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Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
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When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
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And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
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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.
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I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
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Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president's particular agenda - and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
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The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.
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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.
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
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Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
John Irving
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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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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.
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
John Irving
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Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
John Irving
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If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
John Irving
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I think that was when the headmaster realized he had lost he realized then that he was finished. Because, what could he do? Was he going to tell us to stop praying? We kept our heads bowed and we kept praying. Even as awkward as he was, the Rev. Mr. Merrill had made it clear to us that there was no end to praying for Owen Meany.
John Irving