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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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No touching Baby Jesus.” “But we’re his parents!” proclaimed Mary Beth, who was being generous to include poor Joseph under this appellation. “Mary Beth,” Barb Wiggin said, “if you touch the Baby Jesus, I’m putting you in a cow costume.
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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.
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You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
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I'm a worst-case scenario person. I'm only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.
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People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
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I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.
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Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story rumors don't care what's true.
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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
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So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like I'm writing that book review for every bad book reviewer I've ever known and it's a way of saying [thrusts a middle finger into the air] this is how you ought to do it. I like to rub their noses in it.
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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
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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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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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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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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
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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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The object of war is to survive it.
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So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
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You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
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Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
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