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

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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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If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
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Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
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I've always been slow but I'm even slower now. I'm more into the waiting, or I guess I'm more patient about the waiting.
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I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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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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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
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You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
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The ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
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Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
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You think you have a memory but it has you!
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Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
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Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water... remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.
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Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
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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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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
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