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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Differences
Character
Persons
Person
Important
Always
Main
Difference

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Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you
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The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.
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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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Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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Owen Meany believed that “coincidence” was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design – more powerful and unstoppable than the Yankee Flyer. (a train)
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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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Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
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The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
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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 only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
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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
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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
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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
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