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Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Self
Loneliness
Hatred
Worse

More quotes by John Irving

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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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I've always been slow but I'm even slower now. I'm more into the waiting, or I guess I'm more patient about the waiting.
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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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It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
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Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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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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My life is a reading list.
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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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Keep passing the open windows.
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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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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
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There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.
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You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
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The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
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