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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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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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I don't begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
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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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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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Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
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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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What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
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Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?
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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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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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If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
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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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You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
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The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.
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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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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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