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Rituals are comforting rituals combat 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
Rituals
Comforting
Ritual
Combat
Loneliness

More quotes by John Irving

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In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
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but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
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And never forget, there is memory.
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The object of war is to survive it.
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No touching Baby Jesus.” “But we’re his parents!” proclaimed Mary Beth, who was being generous to include poor Joseph under this appellation. “Mary Beth,” Barb Wiggin said, “if you touch the Baby Jesus, I’m putting you in a cow costume.
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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.
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
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There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
John Irving
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When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
John Irving
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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
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The concept of writing a novel and not knowing where it's going - I don't know how to do that. Novels are plot- and character-driven, so if I don't know what becomes of people, how can I know where it should begin?
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
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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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You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.
John Irving
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Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
John Irving