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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

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Going
Literary
Ministers
Believer
Moved
Habit
Listen
Church
Faith
Minister

More quotes by 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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You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
John Irving
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… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
John Irving
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And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
John Irving
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
John Irving
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What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
John Irving
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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
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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Half my life is an act of revision.
John Irving
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For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.
John Irving
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Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.
John Irving
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… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
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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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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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
John Irving
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It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
John Irving
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I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
John Irving
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I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
John Irving