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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
Good
Imitator
Observers
Ruthless
Writers
Behavior
Knew
Human
Humans
Imitators

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Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
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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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I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.
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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
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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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And never forget, there is memory.
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You think you have a memory but it has you!
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Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
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(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
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I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them...they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.
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. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
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… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
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When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
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It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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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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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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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
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The object of war is to survive it.
John Irving