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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
John Irving
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A writer is a vehicle. I feel the story I am writing existed before I existed; I'm just the slob who finds it, and rather clumsily tries to do it, and the characters, justice.
John Irving
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You live your life at the time you live it — you don't have much of an overview when what's happening to you is still happening.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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When however small a measure of jealousy is mixed with misunderstanding, there is going to be trouble.
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So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone's older brother and someone's older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them.
John Irving
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Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
John Irving
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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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The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.
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Ted Seabrooke, my wrestling coach, had a kind of Nietzschean effect on me in terms of not just his estimation of my limited abilities, but his decidedly philosophical stance about how to conduct your life, what you should do to compensate for your limitations. This was essential to me, both as a student—and not a good one—and as a wrestler who was not a natural athlete but who had found something he loved.
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People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
John Irving
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Loving someone as a parent can produce a cloud that conceals from vision what correct behavior is.
John Irving
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If you care about something you have to protect it. If you're lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
John Irving
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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious. Prostitutes know this too.
John Irving
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The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.
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.
John Irving
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I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
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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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Death, it seems," Garp wrote, "does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.
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Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.
John Irving
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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.
John Irving
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Every study of the gods, of everyone's gods, is a revelation of vengeance towards the innocent.
John Irving
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Homer and Candy passed by the empty and brightly lit dispensary; they peeked into Nurse Angela's empty office. Homer knew better than to peek into the delivery room when the light was on. From the dormitory, they could hear Dr. Larch's reading voice. Although Candy held tightly to his hand, Homer was inclined to hurry - in order not to miss the bedtime story.
John Irving
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Quote of the day
Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.
Georges Bataille
John Irving
Creative Commons
Born:
March 2, 1942
(age 82)
Bio:
John Winslow Irving is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.
Known for:
Avenue of Mysteries (2015)
The World According to Garp (1978)
A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)
The Cider House Rules (1985)
In One Person (2012)
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