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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Allows
Religion
Use
Ends
Doe
Self
Centered

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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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If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
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You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
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My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.
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People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
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If I had to be anything, he told her, I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.
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I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
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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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Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
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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 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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It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
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I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them...they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.
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Owen Meany believed that “coincidence” was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design – more powerful and unstoppable than the Yankee Flyer. (a train)
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In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met 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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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.
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