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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

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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
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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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He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
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Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
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I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
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They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
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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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… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
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People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
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I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
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In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
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Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
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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.
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(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
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I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
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