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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.
John Irving
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Factors
Reason
Hard
Writing
Work
Love
Unspoken
Factor
More quotes by John Irving
O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
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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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If I had to be anything, he told her, I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.
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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 don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
John Irving
You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
John Irving
Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
John Irving
She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
John Irving
Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
John Irving
Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
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
People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
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You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
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It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support they want someone to say, Good job.
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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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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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I'm not a movie person. They're collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.
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And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
John Irving