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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Forethought
Coincidences
Coincidence
Reasonable
Novel
Amount
Young

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I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
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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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If you asked me one day, I might say, Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious. If you asked me another day, I'd just say flat out, No.
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You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
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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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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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Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
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But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.
John Irving
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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
John Irving
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
John Irving
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Half my life is an act of revision.
John Irving
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It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
John Irving
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Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!
John Irving
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. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
John Irving
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… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
John Irving
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It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support they want someone to say, Good job.
John Irving