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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

More quotes by John Irving

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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
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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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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.
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Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
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I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
John Irving
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Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
John Irving
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The object of war is to survive it.
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The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.
John Irving
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Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.
John Irving
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I'm not a movie person. They're collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.
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Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water... remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.
John Irving
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You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life
John Irving
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The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
John Irving
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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
John Irving
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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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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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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
John Irving