Top 100 John Irving Quotes
#1. I actually remember my grandfather better as a woman than as a man.
John Irving
#2. Grant us safe lodging, and holy rest," Mrs. Grogan was saying, "and peace at last." Amen, thought Wilbur Larch, the Saint of St. Cloud's, who was seventy-something, and an ether addict, and who felt that he'd come a long way and still had a long way to go.
John Irving
#3. Ad majorem Dei gloriam - to the greater glory of God.
John Irving
#4. People regard art too highly, and history not enough
John Irving
#5. Grown-ups shouldn't finish books they're not enjoying. When you're no longer a child, and you no longer live at home, you don't have to finish everything on your plate. One reward of leaving school is that you don't have to finish books you don't like.
John Irving
#7. Ruth knew very well what the killer thought he had heard: he'd heard the sound of someone trying not to make a sound - that's what he'd heard.
John Irving
#8. Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.
John Irving
#9. But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.
John Irving
#10. No, it's never easier. The new book doesn't know the first four were ever written.
John Irving
#11. Here come the characters who comprise the movie vermin, the Hollywood scum, the film slime - the aforementioned "unscrupulous cowards of mediocrity." Fortunately, they are minor characters, yet so distasteful that their introduction has been delayed as long as possible.
John Irving
#12. Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
John Irving
#13. One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.
John Irving
#15. The student and the teacher had contrasting ideas about the sentence, which was: There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
John Irving
#16. After all: I had been practicing lifting up Owen Meany - forever. The
John Irving
#17. Treading water, a little dog-paddling - it's a lot like writing a novel, Clark," the dump reader told his former student. "It feels like you're going a long way, because it's a lot of work, but you're basically covering old ground - you're hanging out in familiar territory.
John Irving
#18. Do not forget the past; forgive the past.
John Irving
#19. His exposure to storytelling, through Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, had ill prepared him for characters who came from and traveled nowhere -- or for stories that made no sense.
John Irving
#20. Later, in her suite at the Stanhope, Ruth resisted calling Eddie. Besides, at the New York Athletic Club, they probably refused to answer the phone after a certain hour. Or else they would demand to know, when you called, if you were wearing a coat and tie.
John Irving
#21. My mother and I smoked a cigarette; she was trying to quit as I was trying to start. Therefore, we shared a cigarette between us- in fact, we'd promised never to smoke a whole one alone.
John Irving
#22. ... but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human.
John Irving
#23. The past was where he lived most confidently, and with the surest sense of knowing who he was - not only as a novelist.
John Irving
#24. All his life he would hold this moment as exemplary of what love was. It was not wanting anything more, nor was it expecting people to exceed what they had just accomplished; it was simply feeling so complete.
John Irving
#25. The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.
John Irving
#26. Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.
John Irving
#27. We're as common as rain. And she was right: 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; they are always logical exaggerations, nothing more.
John Irving
#28. Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult - in any way - something in your childhood dies.
John Irving
#29. 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.
John Irving
#30. 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
#31. O God - please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
John Irving
#32. A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.
John Irving
#33. You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
John Irving
#34. Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president's particular agenda - and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
John Irving
#35. I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.
John Irving
#36. Ruth Cole was a novelist; novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police - preferably in writing.
John Irving
#37. But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.
John Irving
#38. I must part with you for my whole life," she read, with horror. "I must begin a new existence amongst strange faces and strange scenes." The truth of that closed the book for her, forever.
John Irving
#39. Aren't eccentricities fairly common among overachievers.
John Irving
#41. Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
John Irving
#42. Jenny Fields felt undone, the way only a person who has been careful can feel when confronted by a mistake.
John Irving
#43. The chain of events, the links in our lives - what leads us where we're going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don't see coming, and what we do - all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious.
John Irving
#44. Okay, I said. I still have that photograph, though I don't like remembering any part of the day Carlton Delacorte died.
John Irving
#45. Let the grave mound grow a little grass, I always say; then it's safe to look.
John Irving
#46. The operas I loved were nineteenth-century novels!
John Irving
#47. THERE'S NO NEED TO BE CRUDE,' said Owen Meany.
John Irving
#48. the public entertainment of any period distinguishing the period as clearly as its so-called politics,
John Irving
#49. DON'T GIVE ME THE SHIVERS,' Owen said.
John Irving
#50. Anyone can be sentimental about the nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don't believe in the resurrection, you're not a believer."
"If you don't believe in Easter," Owen Meany said. "Don't kid yourself - Don't call yourself a Christian.
John Irving
#51. It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
John Irving
#52. But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.
John Irving
#53. Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
John Irving
#54. If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
John Irving
#55. Where our desires "come from"; that is a dark, winding road.
John Irving
#56. ... and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
John Irving
#57. Never confuse faith, or belief - of any kind - with something even remotely intellectual.
John Irving
#58. Not every collision course comes as a surprise.
John Irving
#59. Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.
John Irving
#60. Foreshadowing is the storytelling companion of fate.
John Irving
#61. In other parts of the world, they have double-bed sheets," wrote Wilbur Larch in A Brief History of St. Cloud's. "Here in St. Cloud's we do without - we just do without.
John Irving
#63. 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.
John Irving
#64. Jenny decided that all manifestations of her innocence were futile and appeared defensive.
John Irving
#65. 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.
John Irving
#66. All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let's just leave them be. Don't judge them. You are not superior to them - don't put them down.
John Irving
#67. Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there was no room for doubt, there would be no room for me. - FREDERICK BUECHNER
John Irving
#68. In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
John Irving
#69. 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
#70. Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)
John Irving
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Everybody dies ... The thing is, to have a life before we die.
John Irving
#74. Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
John Irving
#75. As for Jenny, she felt only that women - just like men - should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.
John Irving
#76. You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who's leaping up and down on a bed.
John Irving
#77. I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar-you live next to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace.
John Irving
#78. Mr. Wiggin injected a kind of horror-movie element into the Christmas miracle; to the rector, every Bible story was-if properly understood-threatening.
John Irving
#79. Don't get your balls crossed about it.
John Irving
#80. At times, he admitted, he had been very happy in the apple business. He knew what Larch would have told him: that his happiness was not the point, or that it wasn't as important as his usefulness.
John Irving
#81. 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.
John Irving
#82. Was he nice? He didn't know. He hoped he was, but how many of us truly know?
John Irving
#83. It was not out of love that I wanted to meet my father, but out of the darkest curiosity - to be able to recognize, in myself, what evil I might be capable of.
John Irving
#84. I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
John Irving
#85. The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you will believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences.
John Irving
#86. You remember how I used to tell you that I was Doctor Larch's helper?" Homer asked Angel.
"Right," said Angel Wells.
"Well, I got very good
at helping him," Homer said. "Very good. I'm not an amateur
John Irving
#87. ... there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.
John Irving
#88. 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.
John Irving
#89. When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
John Irving
#90. Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
John Irving
#91. It's like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine.
(on Tom Wolfe)
John Irving
#92. If you want to worry about something, you ought to worry about how Guadalupe was looking at you. Like she's still making up her mind about you. Guadalupe hasn't decided about you," the clairvoyant child had told him.
John Irving
#93. Many of Juan Diego's demons had been his childhood companions-he knew them so well, they were as familiar as friends.
John Irving
#94. I don't read anything electronically. I don't write electronically, either - except e-mails to my family and friends. I write in longhand. I have always written first drafts by hand, but I used to write subsequent drafts and insert pages on a typewriter.
John Irving
#95. Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
John Irving
#96. I'm just a woman with a penis! she would say, her voice rising.
John Irving
#97. 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
#98. There are always suicides," Garp wrote, "among people who are unable to say what they mean".
John Irving
#99. You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
John Irving
#100. What she might have told him was that taxidermy, like sex, is a very personal subject; the manner in which we impose it on others should be discreet.
John Irving
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