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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
Terribly
Family
Teenage
Years
Sunday
Expected

More quotes by John Irving

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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
John Irving
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Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
John Irving
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.
John Irving
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You don't have to be in the habit of going to church to listen to such a literary minister you don't have to be a believer to be moved by Mr. Buechner's faith.
John Irving
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. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
John Irving
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but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving
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My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!
John Irving
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I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
John Irving
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My brain is sending poison to my heart.
John Irving
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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
John Irving
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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
John Irving
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And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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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
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I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
John Irving
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
John Irving