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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
Hatred
Worse
Self
Loneliness

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I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.
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Half my life is an act of revision.
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If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
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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.
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It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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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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If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
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I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand-in addition to how much it slows you down-is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.
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I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.
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People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
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The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.
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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.
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What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
John Irving