Top 100 Irving Quotes
#1. A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me.
John Niven
#2. If a man, in a lifetime of 50 years, can point to six songs that are immediately identifiable, he has achieved something. Irving Berlin can sing 60 that are immediately identifiable. Somebody once said you couldn't have a holiday without his permission.
Sammy Cahn
#3. Dietz and Schwartz have sort of fallen by the wayside a little bit, and they are up there with Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. They are the finest of the revue composers - their stuff is so good and so strong.
Douglas Carter Beane
#4. Box-office poison? Mr. Louis B. Mayer always asserted that the studio had built Stage 22, Stage 24 and the Irving Thalberg Building, brick by brick, from the income on my pictures.
Joan Crawford
#5. If I had to pick, I'd say my favorite book is 'A Prayer For Owen Meany', by John Irving.
Sarah Dessen
#6. Irving Berlin said, "Popular music is popular because a lot of people like it." That doesn't mean it's good or bad - that's the equivalent of arguing the merits of hotdogs versus hamburgers. What the hell difference does it make?
Lester Bangs
#7. My father and my uncle used to be amateur monologuists because their generation grew up with Henry Irving and the like, and they had that style of delivery, of declamation: 'The Belllllls!' What we call 'ham' now, larger than life.
Ron Moody
#8. NBC's a little jealous of CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer. They want to get a reporter with a macho-sounding name too, so they're changing Irving R. Levine's name to Scud Shrapnel.
Johnny Carson
#9. For me, when you are talking about perfect songs, you're talking about Gershwin, 'Someone To Watch Over Me.' Or Larry Hart and Richard Rodgers. Or some of the great Cole Porter songs, whether it's 'Night and Day' or some of the comedy songs. Or Irving Berlin, of course.
Maury Yeston
#10. One of my all-time favorite photographers is Irving Penn. I wish I could have watched him work.
Mary Ellen Mark
#11. I've got a basketball signed by all the greats from Julius Irving to Oscar Robinson. It was at an All Star game I got them all to sign it. So that ain't going nowhere. I'm going to die with that in my casket.
Ice Cube
#12. I always just wanted to be a movie actress, like Lily Tomlin or Ruth Gordon. I just imagined myself being in a movie, wearing stylish women's clothing the way I saw Amy Irving wearing it.
Jenny Slate
#13. I want to say at once that I frankly believe that Irving Berlin is the greatest songwriter that has ever lived ... His songs are exquisite cameos of perfection, and each one of them is as beautiful as its neighbor. Irving Berlin remains, I think, America's Schubert.
George Gershwin
#14. We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached. Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way. - Irving Townshend, Separate Lives
Michael Korda
#15. The only person I did bondage for was Irving Klaw and his sister Paula. Usually they would shoot four or five models every Saturday. He wouldn't pay for the regular pictures unless we did some bondage. So I did bondage shots to get paid for the other photos.
Bettie Page
#16. I'm big on story structure. I studied with John Truby, who mapped out story by means of moral wants and needs, and that's what I do. Hey, so does John Irving.
Caroline Leavitt
#17. David Irving is not just a Fascist historian . He is also a great historian of Fascism .
Christopher Hitchens
#18. The average trade book has a shelf life of between milk and yogurt, except for books by any member of the Irving Wallace family - they have preservatives.
Calvin Trillin
#20. In 1968, I left Cambridge and went to work in New York with Irving M. London, who was then the chairman of the Department of Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Tim Hunt
#21. I've outdone anyone you can name - Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.
James Brown
#22. The songwriters whom we think of being the greatest songwriters usually write one hit and six or seven flops. That includes the Irving Berlins and the Hoagy Carmichaels, the Harold Arlens, Cole Porter.
Ahmet Ertegun
#23. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, who said to his tailor Irving, Forget the slacks - please work on the blazer! Never got a dinner!
Red Buttons
#24. Hearing this, I was reminded of Hajo's comment the previous summer. "People like David Irving do not throw firebombs. They throw the words that can cause others to throw those firebombs.
Deborah E. Lipstadt
#25. It was a pastiche of public library porn from Irving Stone to Philip Roth.
Nell Zink
#26. I don't like gimmicky pictures; I've always hated them. I like pictures that are very clear and clean, whether you're a great street photographer - somebody like Friedlander or Winogrand or Cartier-Bresson - or whether you're a portraitist, like Irving Penn.
Mary Ellen Mark
#27. The extraordinary thing about Irving Berlin is that he's like the American Mozart! It seems as if his songs were always there. How do you put together songs like 'Always' or 'Cheek To Cheek'? Songs of his are, frankly, perfect.
Maury Yeston
#28. I wanted Cathy and Irving to actually say 'I do' and be pronounced husband and wife on Feb. 5, which is my mom's birthday.
Cathy Guisewite
#29. services as a tree trimmer.92 In the fall of 1975, while still promoting Cuckoo's Nest, Nicholson played a very small part in his pal Sam Spiegel's production of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, based on the life of MGM wonder boy Irving Thalberg, who made Metro the dominant
Edward Douglas
#30. I'm a flaming faggot, Irving. I was sure you were on to that. I don't go around waving the flag, of course, and I definitely do not proselytize. Homosexuality is, to me, an inner satisfaction, a pride in a heritage of greatness. To marry a woman would be an inadmissible rejection of my identity.
Paddy Chayefsky
#31. Whatever part I'm playing, I always carry with me something that's been used by an illustrious predecessor. I'm a great believer in a touching of hands. I have daggers belonging to Henry Irving and Sarah Siddons.
Donald Sinden
#32. Irving Karchmar, a Sufi convert and friend, and the author of the novel Master of the Jinn, said it best: at some point, the devoted pass from belief into certainty.
G. Willow Wilson
#33. Irving Wallace wrote a bestselling novel, The Man, in the 1960s about a black man becoming president of the United States. We thought that such a possibility was thousands of years in the future. Some people may still have some difficulty with the idea, but that's a major cultural meme shift.
Wayne Dyer
#34. With a writer's eye, Irving detected Jackson's depths. As his admirers say, he is truly an old Roman-to which I would add, with a little dash of the Greek; for I suspect he is as knowing as I believe he is honest.
Jon Meacham
#35. Irving Penn said he didn't want to photograph anyone under 60, and I think there is some truth about it.
Annie Leibovitz
#36. Books connect us with others, but that connection is created in solitude, one reader in one chair hearing one writer, what John Irving refers to as one genius speaking to another.
Lewis Buzbee
#37. I wanted to invent some kind of American dance that was danced to the music that I grew up on: Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin. So I evolved a style that certainly didn't catch on right away - but I had some good mentors in New York who encouraged me.
Gene Kelly
#38. We were such fans of Sleepy Hollow, in all of its iterations - growing up with the Disney show, and then Tim Burton's and, obviously, the most important being Washington Irving's short story. It evokes and invokes a very specific feeling and tone.
Alex Kurtzman
#39. As Irving Good realised in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a 'singularity.'
Stephen Hawking
#40. the initial ID is George Thomas Irving. Age forty-six of eight - " "Irving as in Irvin Irving? As in Councilman Irvin Irving?" "Scourge of the LAPD in general and one Detective Harry Bosch in particular.
Michael Connelly
#41. In the, uh, '30s and '40s, the Brill Building was the hub of, uh, musical activity in Tin Pan Alley in New York City. I believe Irving Berlin was there, and uh, and everything just centered around there.
Al Kooper
#42. I felt like I was in the best photography school in the world - I had Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn teach me.
Helena Christensen
#43. Irving Berlin was the greatest songwriter of all time. I was in awe of him. But his music wasn't my music. My music was the blues.
Jerry Leiber
#44. We never thought we were writing for posterity, because at the time everyone assumed that all the great standards had already been written by Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein ... The songs we were writing were supposed to be temporary things, of the period, like comic books.
Mike Stoller
#45. A brief short story may require only a few paragraphs after the climax. On the other hand, in his massive novel 'The World According to Garp,' John Irving's denouement consisted of 10 separate sections, each devoted to an individual character's fate and each almost a story in itself.
Nancy Kress
#46. Kurt Vonnegut speaking to John Irving while Irving was administering the Heimlich maneuver in response to Vonnegut's uncontrollable coughing ... John,stop- I am not choking. I have emphysema.
Kurt Vonnegut
#47. As a composer, Dylan now fits comfortably alongside George Gershwin or Irving Berlin, though he grumpily refuses to wear any man's collar.
Douglas Brinkley
#48. I dressed all in black and went to see all the top photographers, like Irving Penn, and said, 'I am Veruschka who comes from the border between Russia, Germany and Poland. I'd like to see what you can do with my face.'
Veruschka Von Lehndorff
#49. I don't know anyone who sits down to write a song hit except Irving Berlin. He can't help writing hits.
Cole Porter
#50. I grew up idolizing Madeline Kahn and Lily Tomlin and Carol Burnett, Ruth Gordon, Rosalind Russell, Amy Irving, women who were stylish and real actresses who did real work and could not be replaced with anyone else. You cannot cast anyone else in Madeline Kahn's roles.
Jenny Slate
#51. From the biography of Freud, by Irving Stone, said by Freud's fiance after he teased her for being sweet, Beware of truly sweet people. They have will of iron.
Irving Stone
#52. [On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'"
(One On 1, interview with Budd Mishkin; NY1, March 25, 2007.)
David Halberstam
#53. Anything I've ever read by John Irving has been really well written.
Luke Bryan
#54. I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.
Jeff Bridges
#55. According to the psychologist irving Janis, is that our sense of belonging (which makes us feel safe) blinds us to dangers and encourages greater risk-taking.
Margaret Heffernan
#56. David [Halberstam] kept on doing what he did because he loved it. One of the obituaries I read quoted him as saying that he did journalism for the same reason the great Julius Irving did basketball: He loved doing it even when he was having a bad day.
Jonathan Yardley
#57. Irving Berlin has no place in American music
he is American music.
Jerome Kern
#58. I terribly miss - we all miss, I think - somebody like the great producer Irving Thalberg. He had a foot in both camps: He understood us creative people. And he understood the money people.
Kevin Spacey
#59. A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe's will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook.
H.P. Lovecraft
#60. A young lady went into a bookstore and asked the clerk for Irving Stone's book, "Immoral Wife." The title is "Immortal Wife," the clerk replied. "I'll get it for you." Oh, please don't bother, If that's the correct name of the book, I don't think I'd care for it. I had something else in mind.
James Keller
#61. (Washington) Irving was only the first of the writers of the American ghostly tale to recognize that the supernatural, exactly because its epistemological status is so difficult to determine, challenged the writer to invent a commensurately sophisticated narrative technique.
Howard Kerr
#62. David Irving is under arrest in Austria for Holocaust denial. Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offence - it is a crime against humanity after all.
Margo Kingston
#63. 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
#64. As far as songwriters, I've always been a fan of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin; those guys mean a lot to me.
Mel Brooks
#65. There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'
David Halberstam
#66. A lot of people we tell the story to assume that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were actually part of the original Washington Irving story, which only happens to be 17 pages. It's a great starting point, and then we built on it, very much in a logical progression.
Roberto Orci
#67. The Darkness at Irving. Hope to have as much fun doing anything ever as these guys have on stage.
Sloane Crosley
#68. In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it, you'll be the grandest lady in the Easter parade.
Irving Berlin
#69. I actually remember my grandfather better as a woman than as a man.
John Irving
#70. A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles.
Washington Irving
#71. Anything that instills a sense of hope will at least temporarily help treat depression.
Irving Kirsch
#72. Someday my paintings will be hanging in the Louvre. [Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#73. Brazilians need to work on their own national pride. I always think that they suffer from national low-self esteem. It's a lesser-developed country, and they have struggled so much. Sometimes they have an attitude that, if it's Brazilian, it can't be good.
Amy Irving
#74. He who wins a thousand common hearts is entitled to some renown; but he who keeps undisputed sway over the heart of a coquette is indeed a hero.
Washington Irving
#75. Most dump kids are believers; maybe you have to believe in something when you see so many discarded things.
John Irving
#76. There's a limit to enduring admiration being a substitute for love.
John Irving
#77. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love.
John Irving
#78. It was only a remote portion of his mind that heard and answered the girl. The rest of him was soaking up her beauty with the passionate thirst of a man who has drunk too long at a celibate well.
Irving Stone
#79. But what courage can withstand the ever-during and all-besetting terrors of a woman's tongue?
Washington Irving
#80. Power breeds responsibilities, in international affairs as in domestic
or even private. To dodge or disclaim these responsibilities is one form of the abuse of power.
Irving Kristol
#81. An affection that was calculated was never trustworthy.
John Irving
#82. 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
#83. If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
John Irving
#84. A person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump, faith in its future progress, and desire to serve the great cause of this progress, should be called not a humanist, but a humanitarian, and his creed may be designated as humanitarianism.
Irving Babbitt
#85. Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
John Irving
#86. His resolve was blown as quickly as the rest of him.
John Irving
#87. Moreover, there was what Amy called "the cocksuckers' contingent of the country" - what Danny knew as the dumber-than-dog-shit element, those bully patriots - and they were too set in their ways or too poorly educated (or both) to see beyond the ceaseless flag-waving and nationalistic bluster.
John Irving
#88. Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.
Irving Howe
#89. The most intelligent defender of capitalism in the modern period is Friedrich Hayek.
Irving Kristol
#90. There is a healthful hardiness about real dignity that never dreads contact and communion with others however humble.
Washington Irving
#91. Screen credit is valuable only when it's given you. If you're in a position to give yourself credit, you don't need it.
Irving Thalberg
#92. I do like to teach. Sitting in my great chair at school, I used to consider myself as some dictator at the head of a commonwealth ... To fire a newborn soul with ardor for learning! At that time I thought the world could afford no greater pleasure.' - Those Who Love, p. 177
Irving Stone
#93. There is an emanation from the heart in genuine hospitality which cannot be described, but is immediately felt and puts the stranger at once at his ease.
Washington Irving
#94. My brain is sending poison to my heart.
John Irving
#95. YOU LET ME DROWN!" Owen said. "YOU DIDN'T DO ANYTHING! YOU JUST WATCHED ME DROWN! I'M ALREADY DEAD!" he told us. "REMEMBER THAT: YOU LET ME DIE.
John Irving
#96. There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed.
Washington Irving
#97. A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.
Irving Penn
#98. All artists are crackpots. And it's their finest feature.
Irving Stone
#99. For the immediate future, at least, the outlook (stocks) is bright.
Irving Fisher
#100. Only the chicken-lover will understand me. He will give me a kindly look, maybe mildly desirous. His eyes will tell me: You might look a lot better with some reddish-brown feathers.
John Irving
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