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"Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer -not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind."
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"Imagination is phenomenal."

"The future is created by those who have a great imagination and the will to make it a reality by their actions."

"A creative mind is a spark of divinity."

"Flawed genius is better than flawless talent."

"People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children's story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great poets to be dead. And these are all very difficult expectations to fulfill, I think."

"I write to fill my mind with the ecstasy of life."

"If imagination is your wealth, then ideas are your abode."

"It feels good to read book. But it is grander to write book."

"Be daring to push your ideas forward."
Explore more quotes by John Irving

"I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with."

"You know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes. No, you have to be able to imagine something else. While you're skipping rope, you have to be able to see something else."

"As for Jenny, she felt only that women - just like men - should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one."

"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."

"Many things the gods achieve beyond our judgement,'" said the sorrowful girl. "'What we thought is not confirmed and what we thought not God contives."

"I realize that a writer's business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again, forever."

"You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them."

"Men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God."

"In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they're foreigners - even in their native lands. In our hearts... there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate loneliness are no less lonely than those who are suddenly surprised by loneliness, nor are they undeserving of our pity."
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