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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
Painful
Grew
Wasn
Church
Family
Terribly
Years
Teenage
Sunday
Expected
More quotes by John Irving
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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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’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
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People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
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I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand-in addition to how much it slows you down-is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.
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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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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
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We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
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I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
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The object of war is to survive it.
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And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.
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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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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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I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
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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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The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.
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Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.
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