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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
English
Learned
Courses
Hard
Writing
Work
Wrestling

More quotes by John Irving

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In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
John Irving
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but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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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It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
John Irving
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The object of war is to survive it.
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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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
John Irving
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You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
John Irving
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It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
John Irving
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When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
John Irving
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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
John Irving
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
John Irving
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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
John Irving
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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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People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
John Irving
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Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
John Irving
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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
John Irving
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Keep passing the open windows.
John Irving