John Irving Quotes
My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.
Quotes to Explore
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Memorising my lines is actually something I do fairly well. I look at it a few times and it is pretty much there. When your shooting on TV, they do it in such a way that it is pretty easy.
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I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it a secret.
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The hardest thing about being an unpublished writer is that there's always that voice in your head that asks if you're really being a fool. You might just really stink and not know it. You have to have a lot of blind faith in the process. You have to like it so much that you're going to do it anyway.
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I won't be in gay parades - I don't think they need them. I believe in class - I believe that people should have a bit of class about them.
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For a startup, you need to stay small so the others don't attack, or you aim to be one of the big guys. If you don't do it right, you might lose everything.
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The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.
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The first thing I do whenever I go to Thailand is seek out the closest restaurant or stall selling mango-and-sticky rice: it's a little hillock of glutinous rice drenched in lashings of coconut milk and served with fresh mango.
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I love New York, and I'm drawn to a certain intensity of life, but I've just never felt like I want to escape from the Midwest. A writer lives a great deal in his own head, and so one intuitively finds places where your head is more clear. New York for me is one of those places.
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There is no one single solution to eradicate phishing.
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This administration and these folk who run Washington are no more interested in our welfare and our well being than the man on the moon. And we have got to start taking our destiny into our hands.
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As a member of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, I am a firm believer in the American space program.
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Mainstream American society finds it easiest to be tolerant when the outsider chooses to minimize the differences that separate him from the majority. The country club opens its doors to Jews. The university welcomes African-Americans. Heterosexuals extend the privilege of marriage to the gay community.
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Though it was never a goal in life, it has occurred to me that I've met six presidents of the United States. OK, I met four of them before they became president, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, No. 43.
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I secretly want to be a rapper!
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Publishers have realized that, unlike the previous time period, American teenagers are both smarter and require more topical material than they had been giving them before that. For one thing, they'll read thicker books. Besides, has anybody looked at the news or read the newspapers recently?
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I knew, always, what I wanted to be. Even before I had my first computer, I wanted to be a computer scientist.
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I would say that the majority of the people I work with are Swedish, very unknown producers and writers but so talented.
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Entire islands and groves of memory suddenly sprung up and I found myself face to face with a deeper awareness of what I can only describe as numerous versions of my singular self and my solitary destiny, pencil sketches of possibility bitch hoe slut thot saw myself as a clown, a poet, a slave, an orator, a prophet and a beggar and a healer and a warrior.
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I had done one failed pilot. I remember, when it failed, I was like, 'Oh my God, how does someone survive this? That's it - that's the end of my career; it's over.'
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In the next ten years we will have to continue to make changes which will make the whole of this country a genuinely classless society.
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Compulsion is a behaviour that short-circuits you out of feeling ashamed, and then you feel triple-ashamed afterwards.
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The curious thing about individuals is that their singularity always goes beyond any category or generalization in the book.
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My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.
