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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
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Lists
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Life
More quotes by John Irving
All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
John Irving
I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
John Irving
I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
John Irving
I'm a worst-case scenario person. I'm only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
John Irving
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
John Irving
He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
John Irving
There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
John Irving
I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure. It doesn't bother me if people feel that way.
John Irving
Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
John Irving
The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
John Irving
Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
John Irving
I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand-in addition to how much it slows you down-is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.
John Irving
The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
John Irving
Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
John Irving
In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
John Irving
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
John Irving
