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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

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Thinking
Clear
Bowed
Lost
Awkward
Tell
Heads
Ends
Realized
Even
Kept
Merrill
Going
Finished
Headmaster
Made
Praying
Headmasters
Think
Stop
Owen

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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.
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I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
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For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.
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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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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
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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.
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When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
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I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.
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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
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I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.
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I've always been slow but I'm even slower now. I'm more into the waiting, or I guess I'm more patient about the waiting.
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You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
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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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… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
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It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.
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Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
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You can't say you're going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We - Americans - permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it.
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