Top 100 John 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 I had to pick, I'd say my favorite book is 'A Prayer For Owen Meany', by John Irving.
Sarah Dessen
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Anything I've ever read by John Irving has been really well written.
Luke Bryan
#8. I love John Irving's stuff. It's that marriage of comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.
Jeff Bridges
#9. 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
#10. I actually remember my grandfather better as a woman than as a man.
John Irving
#11. Most dump kids are believers; maybe you have to believe in something when you see so many discarded things.
John Irving
#12. There's a limit to enduring admiration being a substitute for love.
John Irving
#13. 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
#14. An affection that was calculated was never trustworthy.
John Irving
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. His resolve was blown as quickly as the rest of him.
John Irving
#19. 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
#20. My brain is sending poison to my heart.
John Irving
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Adolescence-is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?
John Irving
#24. IF SOME PREACHER'S AN ASSHOLE, THAT'S NOT PROOF THAT GOD DOESN'T EXIST! (page 286)
John Irving
#25. The two old secretaries conversed in the manner of hostile but toothless male dogs.
John Irving
#26. Ad majorem Dei gloriam - to the greater glory of God.
John Irving
#27. It was best not to ask Pepe if reading or Jesus had saved him, or which one had saved him more.
John Irving
#28. Wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.
John Irving
#29. People regard art too highly, and history not enough
John Irving
#30. 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
#31. Half my life is an act of revision; more than half the act is performed with small changes.
John Irving
#32. One can learn much through the thin walls of summer houses.
John Irving
#34. I realize that a writer's business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again; forever.
John Irving
#35. 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
#36. I never wanted my kids to feel I was more interested in anything I was doing than I was in them.
John Irving
#37. Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.
John Irving
#38. 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
#39. It was in looking at sea gulls that it first occurred to Homer Wells that he was free.
John Irving
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.
John Irving
#47. It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
John Irving
#48. If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
John Irving
#49. No touching Baby Jesus."
"But we're his parents!" proclaimed Mary Beth, who was being generous to include poor Joseph under this appellation.
"Mary Beth," Barb Wiggin said, "if you touch the Baby Jesus, I'm putting you in a cow costume.
John Irving
#50. 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
#51. She was convinced that women were as often victims of themselves as they were of men.
John Irving
#52. There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
John Irving
#53. I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.
John Irving
#54. No, it's never easier. The new book doesn't know the first four were ever written.
John Irving
#55. The point was - he wasn't acting. It was as if he'd forgotten how! Jack still knew his lines, but he was out of character ... Jack had stopped acting. He was just Jack Burns - the real Jack Burns at last.
John Irving
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
John Irving
#60. He smoked so much marijuana that his hair smelled like a cupboard crammed with oregano;
John Irving
#61. It is occasionally necessary for me to tell Torontonians of the presence of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; they tend to think of the Great Lakes as the waters of the world.
John Irving
#62. 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
#63. Americans are suckers for an English accent.
John Irving
#64. It struck him as a brilliant accusation to make of anyone who was slightly (or hugely) different. It was the best rumor to start about anyone because it could never be proved or disproved.
John Irving
#65. That's actually happened?' Ruth asked.
'Everything's happened,' the prostitute said.
John Irving
#66. This prevented Elaine from making up any stories about whomever I was seeing at the time, man or woman. Therefore, no one was falsely accused of shitting in the bed.
John Irving
#67. 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
#69. I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
John Irving
#70. 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
#71. 'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.
John Irving
#72. 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
#73. What would Miss Frost have thought of me? I wondered; I didn't mean my writing. What would she have thought of my relationships with men and women? Had I ever "protected" anyone? For whom had I truly been worthwhile?
John Irving
#74. 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
#75. Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
John Irving
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. At that moment, everyone walks on the sky. Maybe all great decisions are made without a net," The Wonder herself had told him. "There comes a time, in every life, when you must let go.
John Irving
#79. You know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes. No, you have to be able to imagine something else. While you're skipping rope, you have to be able to see something else.
John Irving
#80. IF WE CAN DO IT IN UNDER FOUR SECONDS, WE CAN DO IT IN UNDER THREE," he said. "IT JUST TAKES A LITTLE MORE FAITH." "It takes more practice," I told him irritably. "FAITH TAKES PRACTICE," said Owen Meany.
John Irving
#81. Isn't it amazing? The Americans have so many good afterthoughts!
John Irving
#82. What do they expect of a one-eyed, one-armed artist-- and the son of Garp? No flaws?
John Irving
#83. 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
#84. With women, Ernie Holm had some experience at taking no for an answer.
John Irving
#85. What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
John Irving
#86. After all: I had been practicing lifting up Owen Meany - forever. The
John Irving
#87. Imagining something is better than remembering something.
John Irving
#88. I had acquired an undeniable mystique - if only to the Bancroft butt-room boys. Don't forget: Miss Frost was an older woman, and that goes a long way with boys - even if the older woman has a penis!
John Irving
#89. 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
#90. The memoir-novel dumbed down fiction and traduced
John Irving
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. Do not forget the past; forgive the past.
John Irving
#94. What a phrase that is: 'that explains everything!' I know better than to think anything 'explains everything' today.
John Irving
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. I wasn't afraid of anything until I had a kid. Then I was terrified because immediately I could imagine a hundred ways in which I could not protect him.
John Irving
#99. It is simply amazing, at that age, when you're thirteen or fourteen, how you can take being loved for granted, how (even when you are wanted) you can feel utterly alone.
John Irving
#100. People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
John Irving
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