Top 100 Irving's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.
Jeff Bridges
#4. 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
#5. There's a limit to enduring admiration being a substitute for love.
John Irving
#6. But what courage can withstand the ever-during and all-besetting terrors of a woman's tongue?
Washington Irving
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. All artists are crackpots. And it's their finest feature.
Irving Stone
#10. IF SOME PREACHER'S AN ASSHOLE, THAT'S NOT PROOF THAT GOD DOESN'T EXIST! (page 286)
John Irving
#12. I realize that a writer's business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again; forever.
John Irving
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Inside yourself you're strong. That's the place where strength counts. Strength shows not only in how fast you can chop down trees.' -p. 5
Irving Stone
#22. I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.
John Irving
#23. There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
John Irving
#24. No, it's never easier. The new book doesn't know the first four were ever written.
John Irving
#25. 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
#27. 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
#28. It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.
John Irving
#29. The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings; the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.
John Irving
#31. That's actually happened?' Ruth asked.
'Everything's happened,' the prostitute said.
John Irving
#32. It's pleasant to get used to the expensive, the soft, the comfortable. Once you're addicted, it's so easy to become a sycophant, to trim the sails of your judgment in order to be kept on. The next step is to change your work to please those in power, and that is death to the sculptor.
Irving Stone
#33. 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
#34. They say that falling in love is wonderful, it's wonderful, so they say.
Irving Berlin
#35. The state of my poor boy's health prevents me from leaving home for a night.
Edward Irving
#36. There's nothing I need or want to know from the writers I admire that isn't in their books. It's better to read a good writer than meet one.
John Irving
#37. He had in abundance youth's most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
John Irving
#38. 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
#39. This is a real-life story, Owen," I said. "It's not a mystery novel." In real life, I meant, there was nothing written that the missing father couldn't
John Irving
#40. It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I'm always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them.
John Irving
#41. I slept in van Gogh's bed. I worked in the room where he painted. I saw the place where he was cared for when he cut off his ear. I lived in the jail cell where he stayed. And I looked out the window. You remember that picture of the cornfields through the bars? That was what I saw.
Irving Stone
#42. I grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around.
John Irving
#43. Language rarely lies. It can reveal the insincerity of a writer's claims simply through a grating adjective or an inflated phrase. We come upon a frenzy of words and suspect it hides a paucity of feeling.
Irving Howe
#44. It's impossible in our postmodern era for anyone to be original
for anybody to do what Jackson Pollock did ...
Irving Sandler
#45. There's not much to know about me other than I like meeting artists and I like yakking.
Irving Sandler
#47. His mind was like a soup dish, wide and shallow; it could hold a small amount of nearly anything, but the slightest jarring spilled the soup into somebody's lap
Irving Stone
#48. When I have trouble writing, I step outside my studio into the garden and pull weeds until my mind clears
I find weeding to be the best therapy there is for writer's block.
Irving Stone
#49. GUYS, Owen Meany said. That spring, less than a month before Gravesend Academy's graduation exercises, the TV showed us a map of Thailand; five thousand U.S. Marines and fifty jet fighters were being
John Irving
#50. There is in every true woman's heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity; but which kindles up, and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.
Washington Irving
#51. INTO PARADISE MAY THE ANGELS LEAD YOU,'" he'd said over my mother's grave; and so I say that one for him - I know it was one of his favorites. I am always saying prayers for Owen Meany. And
John Irving
#52. 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
#53. It's a dog eat dog world. But only if the second dog is more stupid than the first.
Washington Irving
#54. A book feels true when it feels true," she said to him, impatiently. "A book's true when you can say, 'Yeah! That's just how damn people behave all the time.
John Irving
#55. But this is what we do: we dream on, and our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them. That's what happens, like it or not. And because that is what happens, this is what we need: we need a good, smart bear.
John Irving
#56. Well, lion tamers are probably difficult to live with - I suppose there's no small amount of testosterone involved in taming lions, Vargas said, shrugging.
John Irving
#57. The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice.
Irving Howe
#58. I do have a chef, but I still go out. Sometimes I can still blend in, and sometimes I get a little bombarded. It's the best of both worlds.
Kyrie Irving
#59. The kind of people claiming to be in
communication with God today ... they are enough to drive a real Christian crazy! And how about these evangelical types, performing miracles for money? Oh, there's big bucks in interpreting the gospel for idiots-or in having idiots interpret the gospel for you
John Irving
#60. 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.
John Irving
#61. 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
#62. Well, I always say the law was meant to be interpreted in a lenient manner. And that's what I try to do, is sometimes I lean to one side of it, sometimes I lean to the other.
Irving Ravetch
#63. And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
John Irving
#64. As a self-described Guadalupe girl, Lupe was sensitive to Guadalupe being overshadowed by the "Mary Monster." Lupe not only meant that Mary was the most dominant of the Catholic Church's "stable" of virgins; Lupe believed that the Virgin Mary was also "a domineering virgin.
John Irving
#65. It's not god who's fucked up, it's the screamers who say they believe in him and who claim to pursue their ends in his holy name.
John Irving
#66. In addition to suffering her husband's scathing portrayal of a shrewish wife and mother, Nana Victoria had to sit not more than two seats away from the transsexual wrestler!)
John Irving
#67. Basketball isn't a game; It's an art form. You master the fundamentals so you can forget 'em, so you can improvise and just concentrate on what really matters: getting buckets.
Kyrie Irving
#68. Reading has always been the largest and most irreplaceable pleasure for Vincent; reading about other people's successes and failures, joys and sufferings seemed to bury his own failures.
Irving Stone
#69. My eventual goal is to win a championship. And before I retire, I just want to win a championship. That's it.
Kyrie Irving
#70. There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in traveling in a stage coach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place.
Washington Irving
#71. It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?"
"Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.
Irving Stone
#72. A poet is deeply conflicted and it's in his work that he reconciles those deep conflicts. The place is the harbor. It doesn't set the world in order, you know, it's the place of reconciliation. It's the Consolamentum, the kiss of peace.
Irving Layton
#73. When my career first began, I didn't have children - so there's a whole lot of difference in the way I choose roles now. Not just films for my children, but how long I'm going to be away, and is Dad going to be home while I'm gone. That sort-of factor plays a part.
Amy Irving
#74. You're not like anyone else, Billy - that's what's the matter with you, Donna said.
John Irving
#75. Candy took the bathing suit from her and used the suit to wipe the tears from Rose Rose's face.
"You're fine, you're just fine," Candy said to the girl. "And you're going to feel better. No one's going to hurt you.
John Irving
#76. Wherever at least two art lovers meet, Vincent Van Gogh's name is holy.
Irving Stone
#77. There may be trouble ahead - But while there's moonlight, and music, and love, and romance -Let's face the music and dance.
Irving Berlin
#78. There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.
John Irving
#79. Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.
John Irving
#80. That's what I love about boys," Marion told him. "No matter what, you just go about your business.
John Irving
#81. 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
#82. I suppose I try to look for those things where the world turns on you. It's every automobile accident, every accident at a party, you're having a good time until suddenly you're not.
John Irving
#83. Every study of the gods, of everyone's gods, is a revelation of vengeance towards the innocent.
John Irving
#84. A lot of people refer to power as shooting a loaded gun. When you have to shoot the gun, you've lost the power. Other people's knowledge of your gun should be enough.
Irving Azoff
#86. You know, it's not only writers who have this problem, but writers really, really have this problem; for us, a so-called train of thought, though unspoken, is unstoppable.
John Irving
#87. Yet Aristotle's excellence of substance, so far from being associated with the grand style, is associated with something that at times comes perilously near jargon.
Irving Babbitt
#89. I'll tell you what's wrong with dumb-shit patriotism
it's delusional! It signifies nothing but the American need to win
John Irving
#90. A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
John Irving
#91. It is well to open one's mind but only as a preliminary to closing it ... for the supreme act of judgment and selection.
Irving Babbitt
#93. There's nothing as scary as the future.
John Irving
#95. 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
#96. 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.
John Irving
#97. A neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who's been mugged by reality but has refused to press charges.
Irving Kristol
#98. Have you ever been in love?"
"...in a way."
"It's always 'in a way.
Irving Stone
#99. There is often a defining experience that marks any significant change in the course of a person's life.
John Irving
#100. The biographical novel is a true and documented story of one human being's journey across the face of the years, transmuted from the raw material of life into the delight and purity of an authentic art form.
Irving Stone
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