John Irving Quotes

In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it...

They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.

Well, you finally got me," Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on hi...

My life is a reading list.

Many things the gods achieve beyond our judgement,'" said the sorrowful girl. "'What we thought is n...

If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sord...

THAT'S WHAT POWERFUL MEN DO TO THIS COUNTRY - IT'S A BEAUTIFUL, SEXY, BREATHLESS COUNTRY, AND POWERF...

MAYBE YOU SHOULD BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR. AT LEAST, YOU GET TO READ STUFF THAT'S WRITTEN BY PEOPLE WHO C...

A person's faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducte...

A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy

WHAT I'M TELLING YOU IS, IF YOU WANT TO DO THINGS YOUR OWN WAY, YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO MAKE A DECIS...

YOUR BOREDOM IS YOUR PROBLEM," said Owen Meany. "IT'S YOUR LACK OF IMAGINATION THAT BORES YOU. HARDY...

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose he...

This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, ...

Never trust a man with a lunatic wife in an attic," Richard told me. "And anyone named Heathcliff sh...

The way you remember or dream about your loved ones - the ones who are gone - you can't stop their e...

Ruth knew very well what the killer thought he had heard: he'd heard the sound of someone trying not...

If you're a writer, the problem is that, when you try to call a halt to thinking about your novel-in...

Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer t...

And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.

It galls me that seeking out the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant is the expected (if ...

She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictiona...

Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a ...

In Ruth's view, they looked 'like a couple' because they seemed to possess some terrible secret betw...

A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more com...

Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prost...

Because who can describe the look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the fro...

You can't learn everything you need to know legally.

In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be s...

It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to ...

but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

Mother's intentions were always sound, never muddy; I don't imagine that she troubled herself to fee...

If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life yo...

Ever since the Christmas of '53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families ...

The lie, of course, is more interesting.

With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. ...

Life is serious but art is fun!

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

I'm not writing non-fiction. I don't feel anything about me as a kid was unique. Except that I had m...

To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family ...

Your memory is a monster; you forget -it doesn't. It simply files thingsaway. It keeps things for yo...

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The sto...

And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished...

It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before t...

Half my life is an act of revision.

I grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. ...

It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympat...

The object of war is to survive it.

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. Al...

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The sto...

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you ...

The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to di...

I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing bu...

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination...

Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for yo...

O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.

JUST BECAUSE A BUNCH OF ATHEISTS ARE BETTER WRITERS THAN THE GUYS WHO WROTE THE BIBLE DOESN'T NECESS...

IT (The country) IS HEADED TOWARD OVERSIMPLIFICATION. YOU WANT TO SEE A PRESIDENT OF THE FUTURE? TUR...

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentou...

We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.

Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.

...nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

Life," Garp wrote, "is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs w...

Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer —not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but becau...

She felt if she ever had children she would love them no less when they were twenty than when they w...

As for Jenny, she felt only that women - just like men - should at least be able to make conscious d...

As Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' E...

I'll bet every fucking one of your angels is going to be terrifying!

Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.

...where our desires "come from"; that is a dark, winding road.

When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.

In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore. And if you're not eith...

When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. ‘’I lost o...

In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases

Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part,...

Garp didn't want a daughter because of men. Because of bad men, certainly; but even, he thought, bec...

...the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.

You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

Keep passing the open windows.

People are like that .... They need to make their own worst experiences universal. It gives them a k...

A terrorist, I think, is simply another kind of pornographer. The pornographer pretends he is disgus...

...the single ingredient in American literature that distinguishes it from other literatures of the ...

It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.

Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what'...

At times, he admitted, he had been very happy in the apple business. He knew what Larch would have t...

When an orphan is depressed," wrote Wilbur Larch, "he is attracted to telling lies. A lie is at leas...

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journ...

When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk t...

Here is the trap you are in.... And it's not my trap—I haven't trapped you. Because abortions are il...

Once the state starts providing, it feels free to hand out the rules, too!" Larch blurted hastily. ....

It´s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them,...

Men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those momen...

No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and l...

This mannerism of what he'd seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice p...

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to...

And what were the rules at St. Cloud's? What were Larch's rules? Which rules did Dr. Larch observe, ...

It’s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them,...

It's because even a good man can't always be right, that we need ... rules.

Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.