John Quotes

It would be difficult to have any unfulfilled ambitions because I don't have any ambitions. I've never been that kind of performer.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.

Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.

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.

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

I pray this winter be gentle and kind - a season of rest from the wheel of the mind.

The nature of the place...whether high or low, moist or dry, whether sloping north or south, or bearing tall trees or low shrubs...generally gives hint as to its inhabitants.

How could I make a little book, when I have seen enough to make a dozen large books?

To have been torn from the study would have been as death; my time was entirely occupied with art.

Delaware: a state that has three counties when the tide is out, and two when it is in.

There are plenty of people to whom the crucial problem of their lives never get presented in terms that they can understand.

The power of quotation is as dreadful a weapon as any which the human intellect can forge.

The number of witches had everywhere become enormous.

I guess I think of a musical as something in which the music is sort of like the engine of the piece - whether it is in the theatre or in film.

You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.

Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain.

I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.

Out of all this struggle a good thing is going to grow. That makes it worthwhile.

The nicest thing in the world you can do for anybody is let them help you.

And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing that a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.

And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen.

You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.

There's a responsibility in being a person. It's more than just taking up space where air would be.

Some men are friends with the whole world in their hearts, and there are others that hate themselves and spread their hatred around like butter on hot bread.

You're bound to get idears if you go thinkin' about stuff

We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.

Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page a day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

The quality of owning freezes you forever in "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we.

And you know what it is? San Francisco a golden handcuff with the key thrown away.

A creative person has to be alive. He can't borrow from things he's done in the past. He can't let his method choose his subjects or his characters. They can't be warped to fit his style.

There's more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty.

Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America.

Yes, you should talk," he said. "Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth. Sometimes a killin' man can talk the murder right out of his mouth.

We know what we got, and we don't care whether you know it or not.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

What some people find in religion a writer may find in his craft...a kind of breaking through to glory.

A question is a trap and an answer is your foot in it.

Socialism never took root in America.

I don’t mind getting smacked on the chin. I just don’t want to get nibbled to death. There’s a difference.

But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because 'Thou mayest.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.

Enthusiasm is grave, inward, self-controlled; mere excitement, outward, fantastic, hysterical, and passing in a moment from tears to laughter.

War is science of destruction.

Our very sexual identities are artifices and illusions, the result of a lifetime of striving.

Government has no wealth of its own. Before it gives anything to anyone, it must take from those who produced it.