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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
Notes
Sorry
Serious
Crazy
Bigs
Left
Lilly
Enough
Note
Suicide

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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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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
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He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
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I'm not at all contemporary, not even modern, and the fact that I would be so quaintly attracted to that wrestling rule makes me, I suppose, seem all the more old-fashioned. I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
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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.
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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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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
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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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My brain is sending poison to my heart.
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Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
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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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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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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
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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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You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
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You think you have a memory but it has you!
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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 think that was when the headmaster realized he had lost he realized then that he was finished. Because, what could he do? Was he going to tell us to stop praying? We kept our heads bowed and we kept praying. Even as awkward as he was, the Rev. Mr. Merrill had made it clear to us that there was no end to praying for Owen Meany.
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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
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