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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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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
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Relationship
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More quotes by John Irving
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
John Irving
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
John Irving
I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
John Irving
The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
John Irving
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
John Irving
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
John Irving
He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
John Irving
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving
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
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
John Irving
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
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
Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.
John Irving
He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
John Irving
This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
John Irving
If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one. But we are a country - USA - that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
John Irving
There's nothing as scary as the future.
John Irving
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
