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I'm not a movie person. They're collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.
John Irving
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Heart
Worst
Kind
Movie
Interest
Venal
Persons
Collaborations
Best
Crass
Person
Collaboration
Many
Compromise
Must
Interests
More quotes by John Irving
I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
John Irving
I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
John Irving
And never forget, there is memory.
John Irving
Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
John Irving
I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.
John Irving
People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
John Irving
I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.
John Irving
A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.
John Irving
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!
John Irving
When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
John Irving
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
John Irving
It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
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
. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
John Irving
…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.
John Irving
I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.
John Irving
I'm a worst-case scenario person. I'm only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.
John Irving
He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
John Irving
