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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
Important
Always
Main
Difference
Differences
Character
Persons
Person

More quotes by John Irving

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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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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.
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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
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If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
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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.
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I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
John Irving
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Life is an X-rated soap opera.
John Irving
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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
John Irving
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but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
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Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you-because you know how to perform them-have no choice, either
John Irving
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For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.
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So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
John Irving
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My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.
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I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.
John Irving
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
John Irving