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Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water... remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Conversation
Coins
Habit
Dropping
Deep
Wasted
Water
Stopping
Words
Pool
Untouchable
Truth
Rarely
Owen
Would
Remain
Sank
Like
Bottom
Remarks

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You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
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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.
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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'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.
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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.
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All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
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I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
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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.
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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
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I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
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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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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
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Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
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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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There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
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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.
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Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
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I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
John Irving