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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

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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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The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
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I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
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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.
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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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It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.
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What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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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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We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
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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.
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All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
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Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
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Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
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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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Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
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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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