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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

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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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The object of war is to survive it.
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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.
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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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A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
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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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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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He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
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You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
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You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life
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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
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I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
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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.
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Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.
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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
John Irving