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I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Enough
Believed
Something
Adults
Make
Age
Always
Story
Happens
Calamitous
Kids
Formative
Stories
Traumatic
Become
Adult

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Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
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Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.
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Wrestling was my first success, the first thing that confirmed that I could be good at anything. Devoting yourself to wrestling, or tennis, or skiing, or dance, or to a musical instrument is a longing to be disciplined for a purpose.
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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
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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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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
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You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
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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.
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Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
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The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
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And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
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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.
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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
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Your memory is a monster you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory but it has you!
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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
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Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
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There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
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Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
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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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