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

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The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
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My brain is sending poison to my heart.
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You think you have a memory but it has you!
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When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
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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.
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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
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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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When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
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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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Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
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Half my life is an act of revision.
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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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There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
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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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There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
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