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

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In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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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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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
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Owen Meany believed that “coincidence” was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design – more powerful and unstoppable than the Yankee Flyer. (a train)
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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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They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
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I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
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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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The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.
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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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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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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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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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My life is a reading list.
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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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Keep passing the open windows.
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