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The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
World
Novel
Uncontrollable
Control
Random
Effort
Attempting
Character
Novels
Firsts
Essentially
First
Element
Something
Elements
Always
Characters
Quixotic

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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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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
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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.
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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
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You think you have a memory but it has you!
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The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
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If I had to be anything, he told her, I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.
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Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.
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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
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It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.
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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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My brain is sending poison to my heart.
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I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.
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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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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
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I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
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I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.
John Irving