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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
Coincidences
Coincidence
Reasonable
Novel
Amount
Young
Forethought

More quotes by John Irving

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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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I'm not a movie person. They're collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.
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I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
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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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There's nothing as scary as the future.
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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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People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
John Irving
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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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It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
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No touching Baby Jesus.” “But we’re his parents!” proclaimed Mary Beth, who was being generous to include poor Joseph under this appellation. “Mary Beth,” Barb Wiggin said, “if you touch the Baby Jesus, I’m putting you in a cow costume.
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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
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The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
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Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
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And never forget, there is memory.
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We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
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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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Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.
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You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life
John Irving