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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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And never forget, there is memory.
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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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My brain is sending poison to my heart.
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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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The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.
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I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
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I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.
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Half my life is an act of revision.
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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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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
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I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
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but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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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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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
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You can't say you're going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We - Americans - permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it.
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