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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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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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The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.
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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
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You think you have a memory but it has you!
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Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!
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And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
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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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The concept of writing a novel and not knowing where it's going - I don't know how to do that. Novels are plot- and character-driven, so if I don't know what becomes of people, how can I know where it should begin?
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My brain is sending poison to my heart.
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… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
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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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In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
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. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
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Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
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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 certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
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