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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
Witness
Rule
Importance
Parents
Parent
Moment
Moments
Impressed
Children
Breaking

More quotes by John Irving

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No touching Baby Jesus.” “But we’re his parents!” proclaimed Mary Beth, who was being generous to include poor Joseph under this appellation. “Mary Beth,” Barb Wiggin said, “if you touch the Baby Jesus, I’m putting you in a cow costume.
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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.
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Keep passing the open windows.
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There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
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Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
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Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you
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Life is an X-rated soap opera.
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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
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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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Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president's particular agenda - and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
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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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When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
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You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
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Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
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If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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The object of war is to survive it.
John Irving