Quote

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

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Second
Father
Hotels
Firsts
Illusions
Human
Hotel
Humans
Survive
First
Illusion
Life
Bears
Beings

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No touching Baby Jesus.” “But we’re his parents!” proclaimed Mary Beth, who was being generous to include poor Joseph under this appellation. “Mary Beth,” Barb Wiggin said, “if you touch the Baby Jesus, I’m putting you in a cow costume.
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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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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
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In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
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I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
John Irving
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It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
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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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.
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The object of war is to survive it.
John Irving
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Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.
John Irving
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
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Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
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Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
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Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story rumors don't care what's true.
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I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
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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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Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
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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
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The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.
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