John Irving Quotes

You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.

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

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

Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.

but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.

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.

The lie, of course, is more interesting.

And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.

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

A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.

I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.

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

How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.

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

And never forget, there is memory.

The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.

We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.

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.

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

Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.

Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.

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.

Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean - make sure they know what they mean!

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.

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

It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.

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.

Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.

Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.

In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?

It's because even a good man can't always be right, that we need ... rules.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

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

I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.

Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.

The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.

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.

I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.

A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.

Life is an X-rated soap opera.

Half my life is an act of revision; more than half the act is performed with small changes.

Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.

Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you-because you know how to perform them-have no choice, either

Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.

When you legislate personal belief, you're in violation of freedom of religion.

Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven

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

He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted.