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
First
Story
Writing
Rather
Inventing
Write
Remembering
Happens
Sentence
Stories
Sentences
Remember
Finally
Firsts
Already
Everything
Happened

More quotes by John Irving

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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
John Irving
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Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
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You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
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I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
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In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
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There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
John Irving
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Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story rumors don't care what's true.
John Irving
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Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you-because you know how to perform them-have no choice, either
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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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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Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
John Irving
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I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.
John Irving
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Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
John Irving
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Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water... remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.
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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Life is an X-rated soap opera.
John Irving
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I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.
John Irving
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It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
John Irving