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
Feels
Isolated
Younger
Burden
Maybe
Ability
Future
Feel

More quotes by John Irving

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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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When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
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The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
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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 first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.
John Irving
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Ever since the Christmas of 1953, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving-Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.
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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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Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
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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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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
John Irving
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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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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.
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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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There's nothing as scary as the future.
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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The concept of writing a novel and not knowing where it's going - I don't know how to do that. Novels are plot- and character-driven, so if I don't know what becomes of people, how can I know where it should begin?
John Irving
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… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign it is at least a form of being human.
John Irving