Top 100 Irving Quotes
#1. In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it, you'll be the grandest lady in the Easter parade.
Irving Berlin
#2. I actually remember my grandfather better as a woman than as a man.
John Irving
#3. A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles.
Washington Irving
#4. Anything that instills a sense of hope will at least temporarily help treat depression.
Irving Kirsch
#5. Someday my paintings will be hanging in the Louvre. [Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Most dump kids are believers; maybe you have to believe in something when you see so many discarded things.
John Irving
#10. There's a limit to enduring admiration being a substitute for love.
John Irving
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. But what courage can withstand the ever-during and all-besetting terrors of a woman's tongue?
Washington Irving
#15. 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
#16. An affection that was calculated was never trustworthy.
John Irving
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. His resolve was blown as quickly as the rest of him.
John Irving
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. The most intelligent defender of capitalism in the modern period is Friedrich Hayek.
Irving Kristol
#27. There is a healthful hardiness about real dignity that never dreads contact and communion with others however humble.
Washington Irving
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. My brain is sending poison to my heart.
John Irving
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.
Irving Penn
#35. All artists are crackpots. And it's their finest feature.
Irving Stone
#36. For the immediate future, at least, the outlook (stocks) is bright.
Irving Fisher
#37. 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
#38. Honest good humor is the oil and wine of a merry meeting, and there is no jovial companionship equal to that where the jokes are rather small and laughter abundant.
Washington Irving
#39. Adolescence-is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?
John Irving
#40. I paint only what I love.
[Vincent Van Gogh]
Irving Stone
#41. IF SOME PREACHER'S AN ASSHOLE, THAT'S NOT PROOF THAT GOD DOESN'T EXIST! (page 286)
John Irving
#42. The two old secretaries conversed in the manner of hostile but toothless male dogs.
John Irving
#43. Ad majorem Dei gloriam - to the greater glory of God.
John Irving
#44. It was best not to ask Pepe if reading or Jesus had saved him, or which one had saved him more.
John Irving
#45. Every man can transform the world from one of monotony and drabness to one of excitement and adventure.
Irving Wallace
#47. Wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.
John Irving
#48. Popular music is popular because a lot of people like it.
Irving Berlin
#49. People regard art too highly, and history not enough
John Irving
#50. Who ever hears of fat men heading a riot, or herding together in turbulent mobs? No - no, your lean, hungry men who are continually worrying society, and setting the whole community by the ears.
Washington Irving
#51. 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
#52. Half my life is an act of revision; more than half the act is performed with small changes.
John Irving
#53. If I had to pick, I'd say my favorite book is 'A Prayer For Owen Meany', by John Irving.
Sarah Dessen
#54. What they had felt as fragile as a floating dandelion seed rising through the hot summer air. Matt had no idea where it would go.
Jan Irving
#55. One can learn much through the thin walls of summer houses.
John Irving
#56. Great minds have purpose, others have wishes. Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortunes; but great minds rise above them.
Washington Irving
#58. Of all the old festivals, however, that of Christmas awakens the strongest and most heartfelt associations. There is a tone of solemn and sacred feeling that blends with our conviviality, and lifts the sprit to a state of hallowed and elevated enjoyment.
Washington Irving
#59. I realize that a writer's business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again; forever.
John Irving
#60. The doctor-patient relationship is critical to the placebo effect.
Irving Kirsch
#61. I do a lot of research on the placebo effect, not just in depression but in irritable bowel syndrome, pain, arthritis of the knee, migraine, asthma.
Irving Kirsch
#62. 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
#63. God bless America, land that I love. Stand beside her, and guide her through the night with a light from above.
Irving Berlin
#64. 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
#65. How much there is I want to do! I always feel that I haven't time to accomplish what I wish. I want to read much. I wanted to write a great deal. I want to make money.
Irving Fisher
#66. I never wanted my kids to feel I was more interested in anything I was doing than I was in them.
John Irving
#67. Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.
John Irving
#68. Play the move that forces the win in the simplest way. Leave the brilliancies to Alekhine, Keres and Tal.
Irving Chernev
#69. Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope.
Irving Layton
#70. 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
#71. The rate of interest acts as a link between income-value and capital-value.
Irving Fisher
#73. It was in looking at sea gulls that it first occurred to Homer Wells that he was free.
John Irving
#74. 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
#75. [Vincent Van Gogh] 'Oh Theo, don't you think I'm the black sheep, do you?'
[Theo Van Gogh] 'I'm more inclined to consider you as an ass.'
Irving Stone
#76. This coupling together of science with international peace, is, I think, particularly significant.
Irving Langmuir
#77. The moan of the whip-poor-will from the hillside; the boding cry of the tree-toad, that harbinger of storm; the dreary hooting of the screechowl.
Washington Irving
#78. You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
John Irving
#79. A new doctor had been sent for, Lazzaro of Pavia, who had administered to Lorenzo a pulverized mixture of diamonds and pearls. This hitherto infallible medicine had failed to help.
Irving Stone
#80. 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
#81. Life is 10 percent what you make it, and 90 percent how you take it.
Irving Berlin
#83. No story ever looks as bad as the story you've just bought; no story ever looks as good as the story the other fellow just bought.
Irving Thalberg
#84. I can't even give my father a proper gift. Every single Father's Day means so much to me. I'm so close to him. He's my big brother, but also my father.
Kyrie Irving
#85. What is it to know a variety of languages, but merely to have a variety of sounds express the same idea? Original thought is ore of the mind; language is but the stamp and coinage by which it is put into circulation.
Washington Irving
#86. The one who has not seen Paris in the morning does not know how beautiful it is.
Irving Stone
#87. Don't worry, Bill," Borkman told me. "I have Muriel and Richard in my pocket-back!" "In your back pocket - yes," I said to the crafty deerstalker on skis.
John Irving
#88. We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective.
Irving Babbitt
#89. A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.
John Irving
#90. What earnest worker, with hand and brain for the benefit of his fellowmen, could desire a more pleasing recognition of his usefulness than the monument of a tree, ever growing, ever blooming, and ever bearing wholesome fruit?
Washington Irving
#92. The one thing we do know is that the chemical imbalance theory - the theory that people get depressed when they don't have enough serotonin in their brain - we know that that's wrong.
Irving Kirsch
#93. As the leaves of trees are said to absorb all noxious qualities of the air, and to breathe forth a purer atmosphere, so it seems to me as if they drew from us all sordid and angry passions, and breathed forth peace and philanthropy.
Washington Irving
#94. If quantitatively the American achievement is impressive, qualitatively it is somewhat less satisfying.
Irving Babbitt
#95. Dr. Gingrich, who was increasingly fascinated with the leaps of Mrs. Goodhall's mind, was still marveling over the confusing image of a nonpracticing homosexual; it struck him as a brilliant accusation to make of anyone who was slightly (or hugely) different.
John Irving
#96. Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
John Irving
#97. It is worthy to note, that the early popularity of Washington was not the result of brilliant achievement nor signal success; on the contrary, it rose among trials and reverses, and may almost be said to have been the fruit of defeat.
Washington Irving
#98. It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
John Irving
#99. If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
John Irving
#100. Things that really matter are the things that gold can't buy, so let's have another cup o' coffee and let's have another piece o' pie.
Irving Berlin
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