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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Memory
Memories
Forget
Doe
Monster
Monsters

More quotes by John Irving

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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
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The object of war is to survive it.
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Your memory is a monster you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
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He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
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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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I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.
John Irving
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You think you have a memory but it has you!
John Irving
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So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
John Irving
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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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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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But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.
John Irving
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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
John Irving
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We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
John Irving
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You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
John Irving
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The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
John Irving
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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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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.
John Irving
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And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.
John Irving