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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
Hard
Writing
Work
Love
Unspoken
Factor
Factors
Reason

More quotes by John Irving

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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
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We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
John Irving
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Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
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People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
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I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
John Irving
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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!
John Irving
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The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
John Irving
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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
John Irving
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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
John Irving
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A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
John Irving
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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
John Irving
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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
John Irving
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It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
John Irving
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My life is a reading list.
John Irving
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Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
John Irving
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The ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
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.
John Irving