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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

More quotes by John Irving

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I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.
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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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
John Irving
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When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
John Irving
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If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
John Irving
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You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
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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Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
John Irving
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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
John Irving
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Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!
John Irving
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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
John Irving
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I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.
John Irving
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The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
John Irving
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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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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I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them...they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.
John Irving
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but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
John Irving