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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.
John Irving
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Beings
Second
Father
Hotels
Firsts
Illusions
Human
Hotel
Humans
Survive
First
Illusion
Life
Bears
More quotes by John Irving
but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
John Irving
There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.
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Keep passing the open windows.
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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
John Irving
You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
John Irving
O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
John Irving
He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
John Irving
The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
John Irving
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
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
Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water... remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.
John Irving
There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
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When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
John Irving
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.
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So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
John Irving
He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
John Irving
I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
