John Irving Quotes
It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I'm always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them.
Quotes to Explore
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I took my acting very seriously. I did over 40 films, and naturally, some of them were called B-movies because the woman was at the top of the billing. Women couldn't star in their own movies.
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Cuba needs a dose of perestroika.
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If you have not been a villain at a certain point in time, you will never be a hero. And the day you are a hero, you may become a villain the next day.
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I have a strong upper body; I'm an arms swimmer, and I always have been.
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From inside where I live, I feel like I just perceive events in a certain rational way. I often find it sad or poignant, and it may not make me laugh a bit. But I don't mind inventing a portrait that allows others to laugh if that's what they want to do.
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I keep in touch with what's real.
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National armies fight nations, royal armies fight their like, the first obey a mob, always demented and the second a king, generally sane.
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My reasons for declaring a sexual preference had to do less with the pursuit of personal freedom than with the lust for pure shock value.
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You ask any person in the U.S. and they know who Mary Lou Retton is.
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I think it's like, you know, you can't get ahead of yourself, because no amount of success or exposure or opportunity is going to really matter or be ultimately fulfilling unless you can be totally present in what you're doing right now.
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I like it when I am in the middle; I am closer to the ball. The manager wants me to pass, to make assists, create chances, and I do more because I think the position is more central, and I don't ask all the time for the ball at my feet.
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What doesn't feel okay to me, what feels a little bit out of balance, is when you want to turn yourself into something else – when you want to be another person.
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My mother giving birth to me was just like Lady Sybil giving birth, except that there wasn't such a tragic ending.
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Insults are the business of the court.
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Only free people have an incentive to be virtuous. Only people who bear the consequences of their own acts will care about those consequences and try to learn from their mistakes.
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From the moment I walked into the White House, it was as if I had no privacy at all.
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My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you'll get a different answer.
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The more you stay with and/or complain about a toxic person, the more you're merely delaying doing the important inner work you need to do - to heal your wounds, expand your limiting beliefs, and show yourself far more love and respect.
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Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.
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Could Henry Ford produce the Book of Kells? Certainly not. He would quarrel initially with the advisability of such a project and then prove it was impossible.
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Once you start talking to people, you find out there's a lot more wrestling fans than you think there are.
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Historians will tell you that they deal with fact and empirical evidence. But that doesn't really help me understand a person.
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Slums could be thought of as the development of a special organ, or they could be thought of as a tumor that's grown, and in some ways is unhealthy and could ultimately lead to the city's destruction. My own feeling is that slums are probably a bit of both.
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It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I'm always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them.
