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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
Moment
Moments
Impressed
Children
Breaking
Witness
Rule
Importance
Parents
Parent

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In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.
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In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
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When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
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For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.
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So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like I'm writing that book review for every bad book reviewer I've ever known and it's a way of saying [thrusts a middle finger into the air] this is how you ought to do it. I like to rub their noses in it.
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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.
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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.
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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
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So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
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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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… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
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Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one. But we are a country - USA - that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.
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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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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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