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There's nothing as scary as the future.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Scary
Future
Nothing

More quotes by John Irving

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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)
John Irving
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Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story rumors don't care what's true.
John Irving
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You think you have a memory but it has you!
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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I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
John Irving
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You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
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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Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.
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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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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Life is an X-rated soap opera.
John Irving
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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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Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you-because you know how to perform them-have no choice, either
John Irving
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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.
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.
John Irving
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He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
John Irving
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The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
John Irving