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Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Also
Largely
Better
Whereas
People
Believed
Educated
Mets
Population
Majority
Wished
Education
Wasted

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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one. But we are a country - USA - that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.
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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
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Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
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The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
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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.
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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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It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
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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Half my life is an act of revision.
John Irving
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I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.
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Life is an X-rated soap opera.
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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I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.
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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.
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Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
John Irving
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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
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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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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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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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