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If I had to be anything, he told her, I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Socialist
Told
Probably
Anything

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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
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If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
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And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.
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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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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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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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(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
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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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What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
John Irving
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Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
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The concept of writing a novel and not knowing where it's going - I don't know how to do that. Novels are plot- and character-driven, so if I don't know what becomes of people, how can I know where it should begin?
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
John Irving
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So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like I'm writing that book review for every bad book reviewer I've ever known and it's a way of saying [thrusts a middle finger into the air] this is how you ought to do it. I like to rub their noses in it.
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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
John Irving
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Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
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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.
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 had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
John Irving
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In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
John Irving