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Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Writing
Work
Wrestling
English
Learned
Courses
Hard

More quotes by John Irving

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I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
John Irving
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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
John Irving
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
John Irving
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If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
John Irving
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My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!
John Irving
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Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president's particular agenda - and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
John Irving
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I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
John Irving
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
John Irving
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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
John Irving
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People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
John Irving
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
John Irving
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
John Irving
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They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
John Irving
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Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
John Irving
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… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
John Irving