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I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I’ve seen in the country since John Kennedy.

John Irving

There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
JOHN IRVING

Four Negotiation Years
If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.
JOHN IRVING

Caricatures Enough Long
Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean – make sure they know what they mean!
JOHN IRVING

Mean People Religious
All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let’s just leave them be. Don’t judge them. You are not superior to them – don’t put them down.
JOHN IRVING

Judging Superiors Tolerance
In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.
JOHN IRVING

Memorable Thinking Trying
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
People only ask questions when they’re ready to hear the answers.
JOHN IRVING

Answers People Ready
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
If pride is a sin … moral pride is the greatest sin.
JOHN IRVING

Moral Pride Sin
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
JOHN IRVING

Love People Wind
You don’t want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
JOHN IRVING

Character Giving People
I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them…they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.
JOHN IRVING

Funeral Hymns Thinking
When you legislate personal belief, you’re in violation of freedom of religion.
JOHN IRVING

Belief Freedom Religion Violation
I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.
JOHN IRVING

Be Kind Bird Rhinos
People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
JOHN IRVING

People Sound Trying
Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true.
JOHN IRVING

Care Rumor Stories

I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I’ve seen in the country since John Kennedy.

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I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I’ve seen in the country since John Kennedy.

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