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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
Breaking
Children
Witness
Rule
Importance
Parents
Parent

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Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.
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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.
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There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
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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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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
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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.
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A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
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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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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.
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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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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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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I think that was when the headmaster realized he had lost he realized then that he was finished. Because, what could he do? Was he going to tell us to stop praying? We kept our heads bowed and we kept praying. Even as awkward as he was, the Rev. Mr. Merrill had made it clear to us that there was no end to praying for Owen Meany.
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Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
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.
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It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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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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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
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