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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
Maiming
Arrange
Wished
Lesson
Lessons
Moral
Kind

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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 grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.
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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.
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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
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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.
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Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you-because you know how to perform them-have no choice, either
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My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
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The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.
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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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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
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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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The object of war is to survive it.
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I think that was when the headmaster realized he had lost he realized then that he was finished. Because, what could he do? Was he going to tell us to stop praying? We kept our heads bowed and we kept praying. Even as awkward as he was, the Rev. Mr. Merrill had made it clear to us that there was no end to praying for Owen Meany.
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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.
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My life is a reading list.
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I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
John Irving