John Irving Quotes
'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.

Quotes to Explore
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A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.
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I particularly like Hershey's chocolate - the kind which has almonds in it.
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For me, being an actress, my responsibility is not to pay attention to all the noise around me and to pay attention to the script and the director and protect the character and try to tell her story the best I can.
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The mind is but too naturally prone to pleasure, but too easily yielded to dissipation.
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Movies are a big part of our Indian culture.
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Islam was hijacked on that September 11, 2001, on that plane, as an innocent victim.
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A big thing that gets people in trouble in the kitchen is not reading the recipe from start to finish before you cook it. Before you start anything, read through the entire recipe once.
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We wanted to describe society from our Left point of view. Per had written political books, but they'd only sold 300 copies. We realised that people read crime and through the stories we could show the reader that under the official image of welfare-state Sweden there was another layer of poverty, criminality and brutality.
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My main thing is music; it's what I do.
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Crankiness is a human attribute that, when people walk in the door of Xerox, they remain human. The best way to get the best out of people is to not force them to be something other than they naturally are. Now what do they have to be? They have to be respectful. You can't be ridiculously disrespectful.
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Teens want to read something that isn't a lie; we adults wish we could put our heads under the blankets and hide from the scary story we're writing for our kids.
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Authenticity means erasing the gap between what you firmly believe inside and what you reveal to the outside world.
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I used to wear miniskirts with my GB top, and sparkly sandals, and the boys would be like: 'Oh my gosh, this girl cannot be serious.'
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What I loved about myself as a teenager is that I didn't know any better to be afraid or to be insecure.
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There are a lot of magazines that are still sort of... that only cater to a certain demographic and only put certain people on their covers.
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My three daughters are all going to go to college, and it's not even a question. When I was applying to college, my parents were hoping that I would just go somewhere. Today, they look at their grandkids, and they know those kids will have a chance to build this country in bigger and better ways than my parents ever had a chance.
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I like 'Rocky Horror.'
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My M.O. is just do what you do and don't feel like you have to make apologies for it. I'm sure there will come a point when I have to apologize for something, but not yet.
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I never had that feeling that I had to carry the weight of somebody's ignorance around with me. And that was true for racists who wanted to use the 'n' word when talking about me or about my people, or the stupidity of people who really wanted to belittle other folks because they weren't pretty or they weren't rich or they weren't clever.
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I believe the best influence you can have is not by being preachy, but by trying to live. For example, knowing you're not perfect, but trying to treat everyone kind and accepting everyone for who they are.
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I'm pretty gritty.
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A person who can't pay, gets another person who can't pay, to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs, to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don't make either of them able to do a walking match.
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The government can't even do a good job of something as simple as running the Post Office. How can it be expected to do a good job with something really important, like educating our children?
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'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.