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My life is a reading list.

John Irving

Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer’s irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn’t reading.
JOHN IRVING

Cancer Reading Real
When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it – rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
JOHN IRVING

Stories Want Writing
You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I’m going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life
JOHN IRVING

Adventure Everybody Father Real
He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
JOHN IRVING

Optimism Quality Risk
It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
JOHN IRVING

Exhausting Knows Seventeen
Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
JOHN IRVING

Condescend Inferiors People
They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
JOHN IRVING

Awkward Procedures Regret
I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I’ve seen in the country since John Kennedy.
JOHN IRVING

Country Hopeful Thinking
It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don’t expect me to change.
JOHN IRVING

Faults Meany Owen Responsibility
THERE’S NO MONKEY BUSINESS ABOUT THIS ELECTION,’ he told the voters. ‘IF YOU’RE ENOUGH OF AN ASSHOLE TO VOTE FOR NIXON, YOUR DUMB VOTE WILL BE COUNTED––JUST LIKE ANYBODY ELSE!
JOHN IRVING

Dumb Monkeys Voters
Death, it seems,” Garp wrote, “does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.
JOHN IRVING

Death Dramatic Indulgent Waiting
When writing a novel, I’m not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don’t know what it is.
JOHN IRVING

Enough Smart Writing
Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.
JOHN IRVING

Majority People Population
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person – you have to know the difference.
JOHN IRVING

Character Differences Important
Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
JOHN IRVING

Beautiful Kids Men
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything.
JOHN IRVING

Minutes Way Writing

My life is a reading list.

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My life is a reading list.

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