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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.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Always
Slower
Slow
Patient
Guess
Waiting
Even

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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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If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
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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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Your memory is a monster you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory but it has you!
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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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My life is a reading list.
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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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There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
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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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I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
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Owen Meany believed that “coincidence” was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design – more powerful and unstoppable than the Yankee Flyer. (a train)
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I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
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Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.
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I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure. It doesn't bother me if people feel that way.
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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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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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The more clearly one sees this world the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
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