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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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.
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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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It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
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It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
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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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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
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I've always been slow but I'm even slower now. I'm more into the waiting, or I guess I'm more patient about the waiting.
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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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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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Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
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Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
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If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
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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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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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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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