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Exlpore more Being quotes
"The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded."
"Being "contented" ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position."
"A human being's first responsibility is to shake hands with himself."
"Being born with a pair of beady eyes was the best thing that ever happened to me."
"Having had a reputation for being sexy is a great prop to lean on now."
"I was probably being a little cocky, which I do when I feel that I don't know what I'm talking about."
Explore more quotes by John Irving
"I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin."
"To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense."
"When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things."
"No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him."
"I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second."
"If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it."
"I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write."
"There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly."
"I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey."
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