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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
John Irving
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Philanthropy
Injustice
Instinct
Motivation
Stronger
Personal
More quotes by John Irving
Your memory is a monster you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
John Irving
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
I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
John Irving
It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
John Irving
I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
John Irving
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
John Irving
It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
John Irving
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
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
John Irving
… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
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
I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
John Irving
And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
John Irving
Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
John Irving
I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them...they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.
John Irving
I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
John Irving
Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.
John Irving
Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
John Irving