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Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Enough
Note
Suicide
Notes
Sorry
Serious
Crazy
Bigs
Left
Lilly

More quotes by John Irving

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Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water... remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
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I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.
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Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
John Irving
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People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
John Irving
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If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
John Irving
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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
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… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
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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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There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
John Irving
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
John Irving
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I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
John Irving
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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
John Irving
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Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
John Irving
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And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
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Ever since the Christmas of 1953, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving-Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving