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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Seventeen
Exhausting

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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.
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I'm not at all contemporary, not even modern, and the fact that I would be so quaintly attracted to that wrestling rule makes me, I suppose, seem all the more old-fashioned. I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
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You can't say you're going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We - Americans - permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it.
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
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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.
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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.
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And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
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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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What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
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Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.
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So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like I'm writing that book review for every bad book reviewer I've ever known and it's a way of saying [thrusts a middle finger into the air] this is how you ought to do it. I like to rub their noses in it.
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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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Keep passing the open windows.
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There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
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Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
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My life is a reading list.
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You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving