John Irving famous quotes

Keep passing the open windows.
-- John Irving

#Perseverance #Window #Passing

If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.
-- John Irving

#Long #Enough #Caricatures

…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.
-- John Irving

#Safety #Viruses #Found

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

#Life #Courage #Love You

I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.
-- John Irving

#Moving #Mean #Expression

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

#Writing #Crafts #Architecture

Half my life is an act of revision.
-- John Irving

#Life #Writing #Half

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

#Responsibility #Faults

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
-- John Irving

#Umpires #Surfing #Novelists

All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
-- John Irving

#Liars #Men #Said

If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn't very vital.
-- John Irving

#Losing #Feels #Humiliating

Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
-- John Irving

The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
-- John Irving

#Way #Taxes

Never confuse faith, or belief—of any kind—with something even remotely intellectual.
-- John Irving

#Intellectual #Belief #Kind

I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.
-- John Irving

#Writing #Mean #Atmosphere

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
-- John Irving

#Writing #Stories #Victim

In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they’re foreigners - even in their native lands. In our hearts... there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate loneliness are no less lonely than those who are suddenly surprised by loneliness, nor are they undeserving of our pity.
-- John Irving

#Lonely #Loneliness #Heart

Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.
-- John Irving

#Coward #Looks #Appearance

Imagining something is better than remembering something.
-- John Irving

#Philosophy #Remember

Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.
-- John Irving

#Religious #Practice #Two

Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.
-- John Irving

#Falling In Love #Liars #Firsts

This is a writer’s lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.
-- John Irving

#Sound #Lessons #Imagine

Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.
-- John Irving

#Writing #Dark #Matter

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

#Taken #Responsibility #Writing

All his life he would hold this moment as exemplary of what love was. It was not wanting anything more, nor was it expecting people to exceed what they had just accomplished; it was simply feeling so complete.
-- John Irving

#People #Feelings #Moments

Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.
-- John Irving

#Crazy #People #Giving

Your memory is a monster; it summons with will of its own. You think you have a memory, but it has you.
-- John Irving

#Memories #Thinking #Monsters

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
-- John Irving

#Christian #Mother #Believe

Ever since the Christmas of 1953, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving-Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.
-- John Irving

#Christmas #Home #Loss

Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean––make sure they know what they mean!
-- John Irving

#Religious #Mean #People

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.
-- John Irving

#Jobs #Memories #Cities

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.
-- John Irving

#Two #Special #Rewriting

I feel more a part of the wrestling community than I feel I belong to the community of arts and letters. Why? Because wrestling requires even more dedication than writing because wrestling represents the most difficult and rewarding objective that I have ever dedicated myself to; because wrestling and wrestling coaches are among the most disciplined and self-sacrificing people I have ever known.
-- John Irving

#Art #Wrestling #Writing

We invent what we love and what we fear.
-- John Irving

#Fear

I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.
-- John Irving

#Sympathy #Laughter #People

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
-- John Irving

#Writing #Way #Minutes

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

#Good Friend #Supportive

I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
-- John Irving

#Thinking #Skins #Actors

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

#World #Cases

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

#Art #Hard Work #Serious

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

#Sight #Order #Perspective

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.
-- John Irving

#Death #Grief #Loss

We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly--as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth--the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives
-- John Irving

#Fall #Sky #People

We are formed by what we desire
-- John Irving

#Desire

Anyone can be sentimental about the nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don’t believe in the resurrection, you’re not a believer." “If you don’t believe in Easter,” Owen Meany said. “Don’t kid yourself—Don’t call yourself a Christian.
-- John Irving

#Christian #Easter #Believe

You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life
-- John Irving

#Father #Real #Adventure

You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
-- John Irving

#Growth #Ends #Grows

You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
-- John Irving

#Psychology #Obsession #Obsessed

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

#Regret #Awkward #Procedures

And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
-- John Irving

#Memories #Book #Tears

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
-- John Irving

#Generosity #Habit #Good Habits

My life is a reading list.
-- John Irving

#Reading #Lists #Life Is

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
-- John Irving

#Jobs #Memories #Writing

If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
-- John Irving

#Process

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 a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
-- John Irving

#Memories #Thinking #Monsters

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
-- John Irving

#Writing #Matter #Said

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

#Men #Good Man #Needs

Life is serious but art is fun!
-- John Irving

#Life #Art #Fun

Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.
-- John Irving

#Kings #Maine #England

And never forget, there is memory.
-- John Irving

#Memories #Never Forget #Forget

Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
-- John Irving

#Practice #Promise #Bears

It seems to me that people who don’t learn as easily as others suffer from a kind of learning disability—there is something different about the way they comprehend unfamiliar material—but I fail to see how this disability is improved by psychiatric consultation. What seems to be lacking is a technical ability that those of us called ‘good students’ are born with. Someone should concretely study these skills and teach them. What does a shrink have to do with the process?
-- John Irving

#Skills #People #Suffering

In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
-- John Irving

#Father #Grandmother #Fields

Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
-- John Irving

#Clothes #Heaven

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.
-- John Irving

#Size #Dread #Gardener

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.
-- John Irving

#Loss #Childhood #Events

I want to go on being a student," I told him. "I want to be a teacher. I'm just a reader," I said. "DON'T SOUND SO ASHAMED," he said. "READING IS A GIFT." "I learned it from you," I told him. "IT DOESN'T MATTER WHERE YOU LEARNED IT- IT'S A GIFT. IF YOU CARE ABOUT SOMETHING, YOU HAVE TO PROTECT IT. IF YOU'RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO FIND A WAY OF LIFE YOU LOVE, YOU HAVE TO FIND THE COURAGE TO LIVE IT.
-- John Irving

#Teacher #Love You #Reading

It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.
-- John Irving

#Trying #Sound

She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
-- John Irving

#White #Judging #Sat

Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else's version of themselves--to anyone else's version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!
-- John Irving

#Country #Two #America

If I had to be anything," he told her, "I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.
-- John Irving

#Want #Socialist

I think that was when the headmaster realized he had lost; he realized then that he was finished. Because, what could he do? Was he going to tell us to stop praying? We kept our heads bowed; and we kept praying. Even as awkward as he was, the Rev. Mr. Merrill had made it clear to us that there was no end to praying for Owen Meany.
-- John Irving

#Thinking #Awkward #Praying

Here is the trap you are in.... And it's not my trap—I haven't trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to perform them—have no choice, either. What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too. If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice—and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you're trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims, and so are you.
-- John Irving

#Choices #Abortion #Want

You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
-- John Irving

#Tattoo #Men #Giving

Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
-- John Irving

#Kids #Hands #People

Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you
-- John Irving

#Running #Memorable #Thinking

Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
-- John Irving

Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
-- John Irving

#Decision #Finals #Unnecessary

The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking ...
-- John Irving

#Thrill #Anticipation #Excitement

The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.
-- John Irving

#Children #Couple #Divorce

It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced - when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination.
-- John Irving

#Children #Couple #Divorce

People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
-- John Irving

#People #Answers #Ready

What do Americans know about morality? They don't want their presidents to have penises but they don't mind if their presidents covertly arrange to support the Nicaraguan rebel forces after Congress has restricted such aid; they don't want their presidents to deceive their wives but they don't mind if their presidents deceive Congress- lie to the people and violate the people's constitution!
-- John Irving

#Lying #Wife #People

wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.
-- John Irving

#Reading #Tvs

I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
-- John Irving

#Boys #Hands #Want

This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.
-- John Irving

#Hate #Giving #Lessons

THERE'S NO MONKEY BUSINESS ABOUT THIS ELECTION,' he told the voters. 'IF YOU'RE ENOUGH OF AN ASSHOLE TO VOTE FOR NIXON, YOUR DUMB VOTE WILL BE COUNTED––JUST LIKE ANYBODY ELSE!
-- John Irving

#Dumb #Monkeys #Voters

Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?
-- John Irving

#Strong #Missing #Want