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I don't begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Voice
Begin
Surrounding
Happens
Usually
Paragraph
Many
Novel
Addition
Results
Sentence
Written
Final
Knowing
Finals
Lasts
Sentences
Paragraphs
Last
Result
Thereof

More quotes by John Irving

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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
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My brain is sending poison to my heart.
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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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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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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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Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.
John Irving
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The object of war is to survive it.
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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.
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
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(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
John Irving
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
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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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There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
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Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.
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I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
John Irving
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
John Irving
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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
John Irving