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I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Former
Worse
Students
Dying
Company
Thought
Find
Devoted
Always
Student

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I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.
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And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.
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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.
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People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
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It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
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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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So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
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He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
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If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one. But we are a country - USA - that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
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Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.
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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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Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
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