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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!

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
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Dear
Please
Boys
Make

More quotes by John Irving

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The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
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Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
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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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If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
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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.
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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
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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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What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
John Irving
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A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
John Irving
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And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
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Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
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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 don't have to be in the habit of going to church to listen to such a literary minister you don't have to be a believer to be moved by Mr. Buechner's faith.
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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
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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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Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story rumors don't care what's true.
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I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
John Irving
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I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.
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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.
John Irving
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You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving