John Irving Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about John Irving
John Irving Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational John Irving quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
I'm not afraid, but I'm very nervous.
— John Irving
It's Shakespearean, Bill; lots of the important stuff in Shakespeare happens offstage - you just hear about it.
— John Irving
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?
— John Irving
He smoked so much marijuana that his hair smelled like a cupboard crammed with oregano;
— John Irving
You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
— John Irving
Most dump kids are believers; maybe you have to believe in something when you see so many discarded things.
— John Irving
Friends were more important than lovers - not least for the fact that friendships generally lasted longer than relationships.
— John Irving
I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour.
— John Irving
Many of Juan Diego's demons had been his childhood companions-he knew them so well, they were as familiar as friends.
— John Irving
Meaning Michael Milton; meaning the whole thing.
— John Irving
Like any good novel, it lulled him into an almost tranquil state of awareness before it jolted him - it caught him completely by surprise.
— John Irving
Once again, Jack reached for her hand. It was the only thing he knew how to do. As it would turn out, it was about the only thing he reall knew.
— John Irving
I shared my grandmother's distaste for the word rector - it sounded too much like rectum to be taken seriously.
— John Irving
Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.
— John Irving
To the dump kids, it also seemed perfectly logical that they were driven to the circus by a transvestite prostitute.
— John Irving
Women readers kept fiction alive - here was another one.
— John Irving
The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
— John Irving
It won't take much of a city to be a city for me
— John Irving
(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.)
— John Irving
But writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
— John Irving
It's as if you've been shot in the heart, Bill, but you're unaware of the hole or the loss of blood. I doubt you even heard the shot!
— John Irving
Am I not here, for I am your mother?
— John Irving
Life is an X-rated soap opera.
— John Irving
A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
— John Irving
(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
— John Irving
I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
— John Irving
This is what a self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
— John Irving
It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
— John Irving
John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?'
— Tom Robbins
Garp didn't want a daughter because of men. Because of bad men, certainly; but even, he thought, because of men like me.
— John Irving
I'm a worst-case scenario person. I'm only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.
— John Irving
If you're God's instrument, Owen," I said, "how come you need my help to stuff a basketball?
— John Irving
The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
— John Irving
Foreshadowing is the storytelling companion of fate.
— John Irving
The memoir-novel dumbed down fiction and traduced
— John Irving
I'll tell you what's wrong with dumb-shit patriotism
it's delusional! It signifies nothing but the American need to win — John Irving
it's delusional! It signifies nothing but the American need to win — John Irving
Both,' Garp wrote, 'were of the opinion that the practice of law was vulgar, but the study of it was sublime.' They
— John Irving
Don't worry - so what if there is no life after death? There is life after Garp, believe me.
— John Irving
Aren't eccentricities fairly common among overachievers.
— John Irving
Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.
— John Irving
Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult - in any way - something in your childhood dies.
— John Irving
Jenny Fields felt undone, the way only a person who has been careful can feel when confronted by a mistake.
— John Irving
The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.
— John Irving
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.
— John Irving
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
— John Irving
If I had to be anything," he told her, "I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.
— John Irving
Bonkie bit Garp!"
Garp bit Bonkie — John Irving
Garp bit Bonkie — John Irving
What is this fascination the world has with death?
— John Irving
Melville's Moby-Dick -
— John Irving
I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.
— Jeff Bridges
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.
— John Irving
Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
— John Irving
Lupe's language is just a little different," Juan Diego was saying. "I can understand it.
— John Irving
David Copperfield.
— John Irving
Of course, apologies are rarely acceptable to true believers - or to anyone who believes in *pure* good, or in pure evil.
— John Irving
DON'T GIVE ME THE SHIVERS,' Owen said.
— John Irving
Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you
— John Irving
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
It's rare when there's something we can do for ourselves which also pleases someone else.
— John Irving
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.
— John Irving
THE BRITISH NEVER WATCH BASEBALL!
— John Irving
That's what I love about boys," Marion told him. "No matter what, you just go about your business.
— John Irving
Ad majorem Dei gloriam - to the greater glory of God.
— John Irving
Safer than we are." I told Franny. "Safer than love." "let me tell ya kid," Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. "Everything's safer than love.
— John Irving
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.
— John Irving
LIBERACE!' Owen would have cried. 'WHO WOULD HAVE BELIEVED IT POSSIBLE? LIBERACE! KILLED BY WATERMELONS!
— John Irving
Rural life in the winter months was rugged: snow-blurred and alcohol-fueled, violent and fast.
— John Irving
Do not forget the past; forgive the past.
— John Irving
Mr. Merrill was most appealing because he reassured us that doubt was the essence of faith, and not faith's opposite.
— John Irving
Like the rooftop dogs, they were lost souls - they were running wild, or they drifted around town like ghosts.
— John Irving