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
Risk
Plane
Dangerous
Bombs
Quality
Abundance
Within
Planes
Everything
Optimism
Would
Qualities
Carry
Youth
Bomb

More quotes by John Irving

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My brain is sending poison to my heart.
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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
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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.
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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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If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
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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.
John Irving
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I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
John Irving
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When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
John Irving
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Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
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When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
John Irving
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Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
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A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.
John Irving
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I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
John Irving
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If I had to be anything, he told her, I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.
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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
John Irving