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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
Family
Terribly
Years
Teenage
Sunday
Expected
Painful
Grew
Wasn
Church

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In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
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I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
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Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
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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’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
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It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
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It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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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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For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one. But we are a country - USA - that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.
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A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.
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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.
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Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
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It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
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