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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
Person
Collaboration
Many
Compromise
Must
Interests
Heart
Worst
Kind
Movie
Interest
Venal
Persons
Collaborations
Best
Crass

More quotes by John Irving

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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
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(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
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And never forget, there is memory.
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
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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?
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I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
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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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Keep passing the open windows.
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You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
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And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
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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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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
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Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.
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And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.
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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
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You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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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.
John Irving