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Wrestling was my first success, the first thing that confirmed that I could be good at anything. Devoting yourself to wrestling, or tennis, or skiing, or dance, or to a musical instrument is a longing to be disciplined for a purpose.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Good
Musical
Confirmed
Dance
Skiing
Purpose
Disciplined
Success
Wrestling
Anything
Instrument
Firsts
Tennis
First
Longing
Thing
Instruments
Devoting

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Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
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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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Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
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Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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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
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Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.
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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.
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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
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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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Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you-because you know how to perform them-have no choice, either
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Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
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Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
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Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?
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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.
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