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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Writers
Behavior
Knew
Human
Humans
Imitators
Good
Imitator
Observers
Ruthless

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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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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.
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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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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
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Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.
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The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.
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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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Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
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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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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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Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?
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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
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My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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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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All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
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Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president's particular agenda - and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
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If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
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