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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
Control
Random
Effort
Attempting
Character
Novels
Firsts
Essentially
First
Element
Something
Elements
Always
Characters
Quixotic
World
Novel
Uncontrollable

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Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
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The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
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You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
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If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
John Irving
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I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand-in addition to how much it slows you down-is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.
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So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
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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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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.
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one. But we are a country - USA - that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.
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The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
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For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.
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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 take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.
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People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
John Irving
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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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All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
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