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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
Moments
Impressed
Children
Breaking
Witness
Rule
Importance
Parents
Parent
Moment

More quotes by John Irving

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It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support they want someone to say, Good job.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.
John Irving
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If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
John Irving
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
John Irving
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I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.
John Irving
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Life is an X-rated soap opera.
John Irving
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Keep passing the open windows.
John Irving
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All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
John Irving
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In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
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Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
John Irving
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And never forget, there is memory.
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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The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.
John Irving
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I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
John Irving
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You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
John Irving
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They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
John Irving
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You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
John Irving
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I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.
John Irving
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It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
John Irving