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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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(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
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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.
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We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
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I'm a worst-case scenario person. I'm only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.
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In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.
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My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.
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People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
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Owen Meany believed that “coincidence” was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design – more powerful and unstoppable than the Yankee Flyer. (a train)
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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
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I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
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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.
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It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
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What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
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Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
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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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You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
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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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You don't have to be in the habit of going to church to listen to such a literary minister you don't have to be a believer to be moved by Mr. Buechner's faith.
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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.
John Irving