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You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Else
Ends
Something
Beginning
Growth
Grow
Coming
Grows

More quotes by John Irving

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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
John Irving
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It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
John Irving
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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.
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.
John Irving
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Your memory is a monster you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
John Irving
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Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
John Irving
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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
John Irving
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
John Irving
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I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.
John Irving
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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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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.
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.
John Irving
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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
John Irving
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It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
John Irving
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The object of war is to survive it.
John Irving