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I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.
John Irving
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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Grew
Wasn
Church
Family
Terribly
Years
Teenage
Sunday
Expected
Painful
More quotes by John Irving
Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.
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The ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
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I don't begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
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I'm not at all contemporary, not even modern, and the fact that I would be so quaintly attracted to that wrestling rule makes me, I suppose, seem all the more old-fashioned. I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
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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.
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I'm not a movie person. They're collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.
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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
Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
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But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.
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… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
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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.
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The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
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So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
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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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And never forget, there is memory.
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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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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
