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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Rule
Importance
Parents
Parent
Moment
Moments
Impressed
Children
Breaking
Witness

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There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
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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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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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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
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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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The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.
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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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Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
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(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
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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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I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
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And never forget, there is memory.
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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
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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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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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I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
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Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
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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.
John Irving