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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
First
Element
Something
Elements
Always
Characters
Quixotic
World
Novel
Uncontrollable
Control
Random
Effort
Attempting
Character
Novels
Firsts
Essentially
More quotes by John Irving
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)
John Irving
Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
John Irving
He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
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
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
but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
John Irving
I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
John Irving
A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
John Irving
Keep passing the open windows.
John Irving
You can't say you're going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We - Americans - permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it.
John Irving
I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.
John Irving
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
John Irving
Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
John Irving
Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
John Irving
