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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
Behavior
Knew
Human
Humans
Imitators
Good
Imitator
Observers
Ruthless
Writers

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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
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If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
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I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
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I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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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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I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.
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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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I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
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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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What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
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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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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
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Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
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I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
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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.
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You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
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The object of war is to survive it.
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My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.
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