Quote

He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Everything
Optimism
Would
Qualities
Carry
Youth
Bomb
Risk
Plane
Dangerous
Bombs
Quality
Abundance
Within
Planes

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The object of war is to survive it.
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The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
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There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
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It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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Keep passing the open windows.
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Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
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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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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
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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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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
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I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
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I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
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And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
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Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
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But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.
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I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
John Irving