Quote

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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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Write
Remembering
Happens
Sentence
Stories
Sentences
Remember
Finally
Firsts
Already
Everything
Happened
First
Story
Writing
Rather
Inventing

More quotes by John Irving

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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.
John Irving
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You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
John Irving
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Half my life is an act of revision.
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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If I had to be anything, he told her, I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.
John Irving
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If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
John Irving
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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
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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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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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
John Irving
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
John Irving
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Wrestling was my first success, the first thing that confirmed that I could be good at anything. Devoting yourself to wrestling, or tennis, or skiing, or dance, or to a musical instrument is a longing to be disciplined for a purpose.
John Irving
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I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
John Irving
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We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
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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It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support they want someone to say, Good job.
John Irving
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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
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