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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
Students
Dying
Company
Thought
Find
Devoted
Always
Student
Former
Worse

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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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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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You think you have a memory but it has you!
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I've always been slow but I'm even slower now. I'm more into the waiting, or I guess I'm more patient about the waiting.
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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
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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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… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
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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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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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Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
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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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I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
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There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.
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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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I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
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Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.
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But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.
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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
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It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
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