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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
Love
Unspoken
Factor
Factors
Reason
Hard
Writing
Work

More quotes by John Irving

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Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
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My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!
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… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
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I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
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All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
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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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Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.
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In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
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If you asked me one day, I might say, Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious. If you asked me another day, I'd just say flat out, No.
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Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
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I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
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You don't have to be in the habit of going to church to listen to such a literary minister you don't have to be a believer to be moved by Mr. Buechner's faith.
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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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They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
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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.
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My brain is sending poison to my heart.
John Irving
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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