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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
Loneliness
Hatred
Worse
Self

More quotes by John Irving

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When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
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Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
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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.
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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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You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
John Irving
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It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
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I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
John Irving
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I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
John Irving
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The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
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You can't say you're going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We - Americans - permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it.
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Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story rumors don't care what's true.
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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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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
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The ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
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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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(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
John Irving
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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
John Irving
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but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving
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Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
John Irving