Quote

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
Serious
Crazy
Bigs
Left
Lilly
Enough
Note
Suicide
Notes
Sorry

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If I had to be anything, he told her, I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.
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It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
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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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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 feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
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In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
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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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Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.
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I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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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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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 pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
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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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When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
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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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You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life
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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.
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
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