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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
Observers
Ruthless
Writers
Behavior
Knew
Human
Humans
Imitators
Good
Imitator

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Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
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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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I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.
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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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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
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A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
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Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.
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I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
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What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
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I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
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. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
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For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.
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If you asked me one day, I might say, Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious. If you asked me another day, I'd just say flat out, No.
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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.
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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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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I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
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There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
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