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It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support they want someone to say, Good job.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Work
Read
Really
Jobs
Good
Experience
Someone
Young
Seeking
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Writers
Giving
Advice
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More quotes by John Irving

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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.
John Irving
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I don't begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
John Irving
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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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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
John Irving
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I'm not at all contemporary, not even modern, and the fact that I would be so quaintly attracted to that wrestling rule makes me, I suppose, seem all the more old-fashioned. 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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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.
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.
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
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I'm not a movie person. They're collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.
John Irving
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There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
John Irving
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If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
John Irving
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And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
John Irving
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If I had to be anything, he told her, I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.
John Irving
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And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
John Irving