John Irving Quotes
No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him.
Quotes to Explore
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The most significant barrier to female leadership is the actual lack of females in leadership. The best advice I can give to women is to go out and start something, ideally their own businesses. If you can't see a path for leadership within your own company, go blaze a trail of your own.
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I have never found out that there was in my family an artist or anyone interested in the arts or sciences, and I have never been sufficiently interested in my 'family tree' to bother. My father and mother had come to America on one of those great waves of immigration that followed persecution and pogroms in Czarist Russia and Poland.
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Service to others seems the only intelligent choice for the use of wealth.
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Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.
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When you've heard one bagpipe tune, you've heard them both.
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I would argue that you're only going to get the conservatives, particularly a Republican House, to pass immigration reform if we, as conservatives, are reassured that the border is controlled and that we get to vote on whether the border is controlled.
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My aunt took me to see 'Salad Days' when I was seven. This story of a magic piano that infects everyone who hears it infected me, too. It was a Road to Damascus moment in my life.
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I just wanted to be like J.Lo when I started. The last thing I want to be is a model-slash-actress. But I love actress-slash-musicians.
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I like to leave a film open-ended, with a lingering feeling. I'll not do sequels of any of my films till I have subjects to explore.
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There is always going to be a little bit of me in each character.
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The woman with dark hair, wide hips, and a few extra pounds has always been the essence of beauty in Morocco.
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The corporate right fires up the religious right against gay marriage and abortion and uses their votes to push their deregulation and tax cuts for the rich. It's an old trick. The House of Saud has the same arrangement with the Mullahs in Saudi Arabia.
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Saddam Hussein was an odious dictator, but he was also a very effective opponent of Iran. He was also a very effective opponent of al-Qaida.
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Texas Republican political leaders take perverse pride in how deeply they have cut our state's education budget. Thousands of teachers have been pulled from classrooms, schools have closed and valuable programs have been canceled. In many places, districts are forced to choose between prekindergarten programs and English, algebra and art.
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Modern politics today requires a mastery of television. I've never really warmed up to television and, in fairness to television, it's never warmed up to me.
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I don't like family stories forcefully mixed with commercial elements.
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I mean, I think I just it added to my excitement to playing today, and just going out there and doing the best I could, and no matter what happened, the end of the day was going to be a good end.
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The magic of creation has always fascinated me.
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None of the longest-lived people ran marathons or pumped iron. They live exactly as their grandparents before them - surrounded by family and friends.
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Radio is not a partner in the industry. I think that the music industry has continued to depend upon radio, but has ended up pandering to a medium that doesn't care.
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I think it's up to the parents to discern what their child is watching on television.
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People live in sleep, do everything in sleep, and do not know they are asleep.
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There's this idea, particularly in pop music and a lot of these pop father/manager types, that you're selling the person instead of the song. You basically want to create something that the fans relate to because it's exactly like them. So there's a lot of art that's made to be in the image of the audience, but then the audience is imitating this version of themselves. It's a really weird cultural feedback loop, and it's kind of strange to watch. It's a new thing since I was a kid, really a different thing.
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No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him.
