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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
Behavior
Interested
Quite
Stories
Breaking
Believe
Consequences
Consequence
Rules

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Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
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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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You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
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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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Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually and almost everyone needs to.
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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
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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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Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
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My brain is sending poison to my heart.
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I'm a worst-case scenario person. I'm only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.
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You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
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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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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
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When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
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It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
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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.
John Irving