Quote

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.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Jesus
Mary
Beth
Generous
Proclaimed
Putting
Joseph
Touch
Costume
Baby
Costumes
Parents
Include
Barb
Parent
Cows
Appellation
Poor
Touching
Barbs

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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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Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president's particular agenda - and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
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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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I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure. It doesn't bother me if people feel that way.
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You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
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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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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
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Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
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The ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
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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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There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
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It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
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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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And never forget, there is memory.
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If you asked me one day, I might say, Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious. If you asked me another day, I'd just say flat out, No.
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Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
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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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If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
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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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