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My life is a reading list.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
List
Lists
Reading
Life

More quotes by John Irving

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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
John Irving
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
John Irving
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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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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?
John Irving
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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
John Irving
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The ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
John Irving
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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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If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
John Irving
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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
John Irving
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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
John Irving
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When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
John Irving
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People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
John Irving
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but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving
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If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
John Irving
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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
John Irving
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
John Irving
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… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
John Irving
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I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
John Irving
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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
John Irving
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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
John Irving