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The object of war is to survive it.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Survive
Object
Objects
War

More quotes by 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
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You think you have a memory but it has you!
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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
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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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Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.
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Keep passing the open windows.
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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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Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
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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In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
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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Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story rumors don't care what's true.
John Irving
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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
John Irving
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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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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.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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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.
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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Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.
John Irving
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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
John Irving