Quote

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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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Future
Feel
Feels
Isolated
Younger
Burden
Maybe
Ability

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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
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Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.
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All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.
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The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
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We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
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It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support they want someone to say, Good job.
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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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I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
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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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Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
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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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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'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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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
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If I had to be anything, he told her, I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.
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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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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
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My life is a reading list.
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If you asked me one day, I might say, Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious. If you asked me another day, I'd just say flat out, No.
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