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I'm not at all contemporary, not even modern, and the fact that I would be so quaintly attracted to that wrestling rule makes me, I suppose, seem all the more old-fashioned. 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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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Seems
Interested
Breaking
Even
Seem
Consequences
Believe
Modern
Contemporary
Would
Quite
Suppose
Fact
Consequence
Quaintly
Facts
Rule
Fashioned
Makes
Rules
Attracted
Stories
Behavior
Wrestling

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Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president's particular agenda - and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
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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.
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Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
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Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.
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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
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Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
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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.
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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
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. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
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And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.
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The ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
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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!
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Life is an X-rated soap opera.
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Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
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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.
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