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Life is an X-rated soap opera.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Rated
Soap
Opera
Life

More quotes by John Irving

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I've always been slow but I'm even slower now. I'm more into the waiting, or I guess I'm more patient about the waiting.
John Irving
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I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.
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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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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There's nothing as scary as the future.
John Irving
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You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
John Irving
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The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.
John Irving
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
John Irving
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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
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People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
John Irving
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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
John Irving
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I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.
John Irving
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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.
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.
John Irving
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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
John Irving
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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
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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
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I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.
John Irving
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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
John Irving
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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
John Irving