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

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If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
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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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Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.
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I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
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You think you have a memory but it has you!
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There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
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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.
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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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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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We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
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Wrestling was my first success, the first thing that confirmed that I could be good at anything. Devoting yourself to wrestling, or tennis, or skiing, or dance, or to a musical instrument is a longing to be disciplined for a purpose.
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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
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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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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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When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
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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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What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
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