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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.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Like
Activity
People
Successful
Frenzied
Rather
Disappointments
Use
Needing
Energy
Recover
Many
Responding
Made
Disappointment
Good
Near

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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
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Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you
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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.
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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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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
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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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I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.
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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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The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
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If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
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Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
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I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
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There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
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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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Keep passing the open windows.
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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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If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
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