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You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more 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
Friends
Learn
Keep
Part
Lovers
Longer

More quotes by John Irving

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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
John Irving
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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
John Irving
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It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
John Irving
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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
John Irving
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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.
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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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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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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I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand-in addition to how much it slows you down-is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.
John Irving
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There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
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
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… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
John Irving
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I'm a worst-case scenario person. I'm only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.
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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Keep passing the open windows.
John Irving
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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
John Irving
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
John Irving
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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
John Irving
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Life is an X-rated soap opera.
John Irving