Quote

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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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Everything
Repeat
Feel
Repeats
Feels
Acceptable
Make
Service
Think
Often
Thinking
Makes
Nature
Hymns
Part
Funeral

More quotes by John Irving

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The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.
John Irving
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A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.
John Irving
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The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
John Irving
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I'm not a movie person. They're collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.
John Irving
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Your memory is a monster you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
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What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
John Irving
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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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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
John Irving
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In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
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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Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.
John Irving
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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
John Irving
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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
John Irving
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All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
John Irving
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
John Irving
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I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
John Irving
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It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving
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The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.
John Irving
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Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
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