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If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Sin
Pride
Greatest
Moral

More quotes by John Irving

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It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
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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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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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The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
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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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The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.
John Irving
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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
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All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
John Irving
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Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
John Irving
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My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!
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But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.
John Irving
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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
John Irving
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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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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!
John Irving
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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
John Irving
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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
John Irving
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Keep passing the open windows.
John Irving