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I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Consequence
Rules
Behavior
Interested
Quite
Stories
Believe
Breaking
Consequences

More quotes by John Irving

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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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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
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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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Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
John Irving
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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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Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.
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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.
John Irving
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
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.
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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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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
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My life is a reading list.
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Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
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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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The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.
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If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
John Irving
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So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
John Irving
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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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You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
John Irving