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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Kind
Maiming
Arrange
Wished
Lesson
Lessons
Moral

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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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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
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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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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
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You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
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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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I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.
John Irving
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The object of war is to survive it.
John Irving
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You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
John Irving
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
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Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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I don't begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
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I'm not at all contemporary, not even modern, and the fact that I would be so quaintly attracted to that wrestling rule makes me, I suppose, seem all the more old-fashioned. I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
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Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
John Irving
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You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
John Irving
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Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.
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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And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.
John Irving