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You can't say you're going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We - Americans - permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it.
John Irving
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
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Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
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Americans
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More quotes by John Irving
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
John Irving
Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
John Irving
I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
John Irving
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
John Irving
I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
John Irving
There's nothing as scary as the future.
John Irving
My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!
John Irving
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
If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
John Irving
Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?
John Irving
The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.
John Irving
Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
John Irving
When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
John Irving
(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
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 is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving
I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
John Irving
My brain is sending poison to my heart.
John Irving
Keep passing the open windows.
John Irving
Imagining something is better than remembering something.
John Irving
