John Irving quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by John Irving

John Irving Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from John Irving on Wise Famous Quotes.

You think you have a memory; but it has you! Later,

(As a novelist, he was a little fussy about chronological order, a tad old-fashioned.)

I didn't try to say the penis word for Elaine. "Cock," I said to her.

Did anyone who was in love and was unsatisfied with how he was loved in return ever feel saved?

Buster was queer as a cat fart.

And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.

Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.

There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments ...

What woman wants to hear someone say what her husband is thinking? What guy is going to be happy hearing what's on his wife's mind?

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

He smoked so much marijuana that his hair smelled like a cupboard crammed with oregano;

Most dump kids are believers; maybe you have to believe in something when you see so many discarded things.

I get up early. I like to read a little before anyone but the dog is up. I also like to read at night, not in bed but just before I go to bed.

Friends were more important than lovers - not least for the fact that friendships generally lasted longer than relationships.

I always begin with a character or characters, and then try to think up as much action for them as possible.

Small towns may revile you, but they have to keep you-they can't turn you away.

The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking ...

A part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around who's enough like yourself to understand you.

I saw an oxygen tank in the cluttered room - what had been Atkins's "study," as his son had explained, now converted for a deathwatch.

JUST THINK OF THIS AS MY LITTLE GIFT TO YOU," says Owen Meany

I'm not proselytizing my method. I don't believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.

Did having a dog make you less political?

If Garp was going to play lacrosse, Jenny thought, where would he go? Not out, because it's dark; he'd lose the ball.

No, it's never easier. The new book doesn't know the first four were ever written.

Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.

Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!

I shared my grandmother's distaste for the word rector - it sounded too much like rectum to be taken seriously.

A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy

When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.

To the dump kids, it also seemed perfectly logical that they were driven to the circus by a transvestite prostitute.

It was Wilbur Larch who was the first man in Maine to call a television what it was: an idiot box.

... there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.

You live your life at the time you live it
you don't have much of an overview when what's happening to you is still happening.

Not simple intolerance but the tolerance of intolerance, which allows the intolerance to persist.

No one could have fathomed what a life he'd led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

Of course, everyone is intolerant of something or someone.

Juan Diego lived there, in the past - reliving, in his imagination, the losses that had marked him.

It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.

This is a writer's lesson:
To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.

The object of war is to survive it.

He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.

Garp didn't want a daughter because of men. Because of bad men, certainly; but even, he thought, because of men like me.

DON'T GIVE IT ANOTHER THOUGHT," he said. "WE'RE PALS, AREN'T WE? WHAT ARE FRIENDS FOR? I'LL NEVER LEAVE YOU.

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

the public entertainment of any period distinguishing the period as clearly as its so-called politics,

Real life is too sloppy a model for good fiction, Juan Diego had said.

In the sixties, dear Bill, we did not say 'top' and 'bottom' - we said 'pitcher' and 'catcher' ...

After twenty years in Canada, there are certain American lunatics who still fascinate me.

I lived five years in the Midwest, and I loved it. The people were so nice. The people were so open.

Garp was a natural storyteller; he could make things up, one right after the other, and they seemed to fit. But what did they mean?

My dear boy, " Miss Frost said sharply. "My dear boy, please don't put a label on me - don't make a category before you get to know me!

Someone who hasn't read a novel doesn't really know what it's about, William.

Let the grave mound grow a little grass, I always say; then it's safe to look.

She was an expert at the art of sudden appearance.

I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

May God watch over your soul, which no man may abuse.

I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.

We are formed by what we desire

Sometimes, when we are labeled, when we are branded, our brand becomes our calling;

Jenny Fields felt undone, the way only a person who has been careful can feel when confronted by a mistake.

(You shouldn't guess about someone's past; if you don't see any evidence of it, a person's past remains unknown to you.)

The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.

Am I not here, for I am your mother?

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action

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

Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you

I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye.

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.

LIBERACE!' Owen would have cried. 'WHO WOULD HAVE BELIEVED IT POSSIBLE? LIBERACE! KILLED BY WATERMELONS!

The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.

One can learn much through the thin walls of summer houses.

We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.

David Copperfield.

We've been an empire in decline since I can remember," Ketchum said bluntly; he wasn't kidding. "We are a lost nation, Danny. Stop farting around.

It's rare when there's something we can do for ourselves which also pleases someone else.

THE BRITISH NEVER WATCH BASEBALL!

DON'T GIVE ME THE SHIVERS,' Owen said.

In a living city, I could never have noticed so much. Living cities don't hold still.

Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.

You'd better leave your chromosomes at the door.

... there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.

It was a deus-ex-machina world!

But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.

My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.

Return trips, to this day ... are simply invitations to dull trances or leaden slumber,

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

He felt fortunate to be with Helen; she had her own ambitions and he could not manipulate here.

It seemed to Dr. Daruwalla that his story was the opposite of universal; his story was simply strange - the doctor himself was singularly foreign.

Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.

I later found a bookstore on the Calle de Gravina - Libros, I believe it was called. (I'm not kidding, a bookstore called "Books.")

Vargas isn't supposed to be faithful to a woman he hasn't slept with! Vargas only wants to sleep with Dr. Gomez, Lupe.

Not every collision course comes as a surprise.

By '95 - in New York, alone - more Americans had died of AIDS than were killed in Vietnam.

And never forget, there is memory.

I'm just a woman with a penis! she would say, her voice rising.

You'd better hope they're not checking chromosomes at the door.

He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.