John Irving Quotes
I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
Quotes to Explore
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It's expected of novels that they should explain the world and create the illusion that things are ultimately logical and coherent. But that's not what I see around me. Often, events remain mysterious and unresolved, and our emotions reach no catharsis.
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We lived in Atlanta for a couple of years, and had a lot of fun, but my best work happens when I isolate myself. It's all about turning inward.
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I've been told I'm a little bit eccentric.
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It is important to be well read, at least a little bit.
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For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn't really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I'm trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.
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The collusion of big business, big labor, and big government threaten the spirit of small business that makes America great.
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Tom Brokaw was never young.
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You should never do anything too much. If you only eat healthy food, that is too much. Success is balance - a banker with no time with his kids, he's not successful. If he doesn't have time to walk his kids to school, that is not success - that is a mistake.
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Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.
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After I win a match, I celebrate it by having an ice cream.
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I always wanted to be a writer. Maybe, had I been brought up in another generation, I might have just gone into writing rather than medicine - which is not to say that I didn't also have a great attraction towards the idea of being a healer. Fortunately, I've been able to combine the two in ways I could never possibly have imagined.
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The progress of India is the destiny of one-sixth of humanity. And it will also mean a world more confident of its prosperity and more secure about its future.
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Without understanding yourself, what is the use of trying to understand the world?
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If money was being invented now, it wouldn't be designed to look like cash or credit cards. It would look more like Bitcoin.
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I have always thought that writers come with any variety of attributes. Some are capable and some aren't.
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In nerve-free multicellular organisms, the relationships of the cells to each other can only be of a chemical nature. In multicellular organisms with nerve systems, the nerve cells only represent cells like any others, but they have extensions suited to the purpose which they serve, namely the nerves.
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I never want to have to ask my husband for money. Never! That's incomprehensible to me. Would he have preferred that I change my name? Probably. But that's OK!
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Working pretty much nonstop as an artist, the hardest thing is to know what to do with yourself when you have some time off. You struggle with yourself to take a vacation.
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We live in a gray world, and I want to tell gray stories.
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Surface is a modernist concept. What surface does is to encourage one to see the painting as object rather than as a window on the world.
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You can choose a future where more Americans have the chance to gain the skills they need to compete, no matter how old they are or how much money they have. Education was the gateway to opportunity for me. It was the gateway for Michelle. And now more than ever, it is the gateway to a middle-class life.
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I'm a pretty intense person at the racetrack, but when I'm not thinking about my race car or in the garage doing my job, I'm pretty laid back, and I like to be organized and do normal things.
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I've no desire to start a movement, to be the first name on an open petition, or to be the poster child for disgruntled writers.
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I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
