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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
Longer
Friends
Learn
Keep
Part
Lovers

More quotes by John Irving

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Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
John Irving
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Life is an X-rated soap opera.
John Irving
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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
John Irving
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
John Irving
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
John Irving
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So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
John Irving
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There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
John Irving
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. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
John Irving
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My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.
John Irving
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When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
John Irving
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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
John Irving
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You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
John Irving
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I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure. It doesn't bother me if people feel that way.
John Irving
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If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
John Irving
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I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.
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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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
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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