Quote

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
Always
Story
Happens
Calamitous
Kids
Formative
Stories
Traumatic
Become
Adult
Enough
Believed
Something
Adults
Make
Age

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You think you have a memory but it has you!
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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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Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
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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 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.
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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.
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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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… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
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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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What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
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When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
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So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like I'm writing that book review for every bad book reviewer I've ever known and it's a way of saying [thrusts a middle finger into the air] this is how you ought to do it. I like to rub their noses in it.
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I'm not at all contemporary, not even modern, and the fact that I would be so quaintly attracted to that wrestling rule makes me, I suppose, seem all the more old-fashioned. I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
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It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support they want someone to say, Good job.
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So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
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but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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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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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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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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