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Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Years
Front
Months
Taking
Year
Story
Reconstructing
Stories
Reconstruction
Back
Notes
Sometimes
Fronts

More quotes by 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.
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You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
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. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
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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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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
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All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
John Irving
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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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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
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The object of war is to survive it.
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Half my life is an act of revision.
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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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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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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I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
John Irving
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We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
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It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving
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Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.
John Irving
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If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
John Irving
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But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.
John Irving