Quote

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

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Likes
Religious
Punitive
Running
Abortions
Country
Restrict
Feel
Fervor
Feels
Usa
Kind
Strongly
People
Abortion

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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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It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
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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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The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
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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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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.
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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.
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Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.
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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
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Life is an X-rated soap opera.
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We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
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Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
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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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He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
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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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
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It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
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It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
John Irving