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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 ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
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People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
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Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.
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What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
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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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You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
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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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Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
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A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.
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You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
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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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We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
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Owen Meany believed that “coincidence” was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design – more powerful and unstoppable than the Yankee Flyer. (a train)
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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.
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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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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
John Irving