John Irving Quotes:

Keep passing the open windows.

source: - FaceBook post by John Irving from Aug 06, 2014

Topics: Perseverance, Window, Passing, Life Is Beautiful, Life Is Tough

If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.

Topics: Long, Enough, Caricatures

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

Topics: 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.

source: - John Irving (2012). “The World According To Garp”, p.605, Random House

Topics: Life, Courage, Love You, Owen Meany, Lucky Day

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.

Topics: Moving, Mean, Expression, Ageless

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

Topics: Writing, Crafts, Architecture

Half my life is an act of revision.

Topics: Life, Writing, Half, Small Changes

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

Topics: Responsibility, Faults, Owen Meany

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.

Topics: Umpires, Surfing, Novelists

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

Topics: 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.

source: - "The Mindful Writer". Book by Dinty W. Moore, 2016.

Topics: Losing, Feels, Humiliating, Losing Control

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

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

Topics: Way, Taxes, Owen Meany

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

source: - John Irving (2012). “A Prayer For Owen Meany”, p.537, Random House

Topics: Intellectual, Belief, Kind, Owen Meany

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.

Topics: Writing, Mean, Atmosphere

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

Topics: Writing, Stories, Victim

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

Topics: Coward, Looks, Appearance

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

source: - John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket

Topics: Philosophy, Remember, Owen Meany

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.

Topics: Religious, Practice, Two

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Taken, Responsibility, Writing, Already Taken

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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Christian, Mother, Believe, Owen Meany

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.

Topics: 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!

Topics: Religious, Mean, People, Owen Meany

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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Art, Wrestling, Writing

We invent what we love and what we fear.

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Writing, Way, Minutes

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

Topics: Good Friend, Supportive, Owen Meany

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.

Topics: Thinking, Skins, Actors, Thick Skin

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

source: - The World According to Garp ch. 19 (1978)

Topics: World, Cases, Owen Meany

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

source: - John Irving (1986). “The Hotel New Hampshire”

Topics: Art, Hard Work, Serious

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

source: - John Irving (1996). “Trying to Save Piggy Sneed”, p.340, Arcade Publishing

Topics: 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.

source: - John Irving (1989). “A prayer for Owen Meany: a novel”, William Morrow & Co

Topics: Death, Grief, Loss, When Someone Dies, Owen Meany

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

source: - John Irving (2012). “The World According To Garp”, p.604, Random House

Topics: Fall, Sky, People

We are formed by what we desire

source: - John Irving, Carol Anshaw, Chris Cleave, Vaddey Ratner, Enid Shomer (2012). “Simon & Schuster 2012 Fiction Sampler”, p.45, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Desire

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

Topics: Father, Real, Adventure, Father Died

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

source: - John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket

Topics: Growth, Ends, Grows

You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

Topics: Psychology, Obsession, Obsessed, Owen Meany

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

Topics: 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.

source: - John Irving (2012). “In One Person: A Novel”, p.41, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Memories, Book, Tears

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

Topics: Generosity, Habit, Good Habits

My life is a reading list.

Topics: Reading, Lists, Life Is

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

source: - John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket

Topics: Jobs, Memories, Writing, Closeness

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

source: - "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

Topics: 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!

Topics: Memories, Thinking, Monsters, Owen Meany, Files

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

Topics: Writing, Matter, Said

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

Topics: Men, Good Man, Needs

Life is serious but art is fun!

Topics: Life, Art, Fun

Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.

Topics: Kings, Maine, England, Kings And Princes, Cider

And never forget, there is memory.

Topics: Memories, Never Forget, Forget

Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.

Topics: Practice, Promise, Bears

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.

Topics: Father, Grandmother, Fields, Jenny

Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven

Topics: Clothes, Heaven, Old Clothes

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Loss, Childhood, Events, Owen Meany

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.

Topics: Teacher, Love You, Reading, If You Care

It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.

Topics: Trying, Sound

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

Topics: 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!

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Thinking, Awkward, Praying, Owen Meany, Headmasters

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.

Topics: Choices, Abortion, Want, Freedom Of Choice, Your Freedom

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

Topics: Kids, Hands, People

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

Topics: Running, Memorable, Thinking

Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.

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

Topics: Decision, Finals, Unnecessary

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Children, Couple, Divorce, Funny Divorce, Happy Divorce

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

Topics: 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!

Topics: Lying, Wife, People

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Boys, Hands, Want, Poor Boy

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.

Topics: Hate, Giving, Lessons, Someone You Hate, Owen Meany

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!

Topics: 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?

Topics: Strong, Missing, Want

The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.

Topics: Doe, World, This World

Human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions.

source: - John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket

Topics: Serious, Intention, Sexuality

. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .

Topics: Doe, Moments, Enough

I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.

Topics: Silly, Emotional, Style

Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don't mean that you can't also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose.

Topics: Hurt, Fun, Mean, Life Hurts, Serious Life

Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.

Topics: Children, Parent, Moments

It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.

Topics: Hurt, Deceiving, Deceived, Been Hurt

Life is an X-rated soap opera.

Topics: Opera, Soap, Life Is, Soap Operas, X Rated

If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. 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. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.

source: - John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket

Topics: Writing, Giving, Cooking, Cooking Love, Cooking And Love

There's nothing as scary as the future.

source: - John Irving (2012). “A Prayer For Owen Meany”, p.209, Random House

Topics: Scary

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.

Topics: Children, Book, Home, Leaving School

We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.

source: - John Irving (1996). “Trying to Save Piggy Sneed”, p.330, Arcade Publishing

Topics: Mind

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.

source: - John Irving (2012). “A Widow For One Year”, p.555, Random House

Topics: Falling In Love, Fall, Love Is

With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes.

Topics: Book, School, Shoes, Little Time

Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.

source: - John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket

Topics: Beautiful, Kids, Men, Grownups

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

Topics: Dies

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.

source: - John Irving (2012). “A Prayer For Owen Meany”, p.294, Random House

Topics: Christian, Easter, Believe, Owen Meany, Nativity

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

source: - John Irving (2012). “The Cider House Rules”, p.472, Random House

Topics: Safety, Viruses, Found

I thought some of the stories were neat; I liked some of the liturgy and some of the songs. If you're a writer you have some inclination to pay attention. I didn't just tune it out and think about baseball. So, it had an effect on me.

source: - Interview with Suzanne Herel, www.motherjones.com. May/June 1997.

Topics: Baseball, Song, Thinking

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.

Topics: Kids, Hands, Said

It's magical thinking to imagine that the reason unspeakable things are being perpetrated by younger and younger people is that they've fallen under the influence of seductive, lascivious, prurient, and violent material in books, films, television. A great deal of this type of censorship has to do with absolving parents of responsibility - parents who just plop their kids in front of the television and leave them there hour upon hour.

source: - Interview with Suzanne Herel, www.motherjones.com. May/June 1997.

Topics: Book, Kids, Responsibility, Magical Thinking

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.

Topics: Love, Wind, People, Parentheses, Passage Of Time

If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?

Topics: Mankind, Ifs

It´s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can't interfere with people you love any more than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know. And that's hard, ..., because you often feel like interfering -you want to be the one who makes the plans.

Topics: Thinking, People, Would Be

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.

Topics: Lonely, Loneliness, Heart, Undeserving

I'm not typing. I write only by longhand. I've always written first drafts by hand and then once I was into a second or third draft I wrote insert pages on a typewriter. But I got rid of all my typewriters about three or four novels ago and now I do everything by hand. I write by hand because it makes me go slow and going slow is what I like.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Writing, Typewriters, Hands, Typing, Insert

It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.

source: - John Irving (2012). “A Prayer For Owen Meany”, p.69, Random House

Topics: Winning, Growth, Doe

How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.

Topics: Love, Eye, People

There was no manifestation of contemporary culture that did not indicate to my grandmother how steadfast was the nation's decline, how merciless our mental and moral deterioration, how swiftly all-embracing our final decadence. I never saw her read a book again; but she referred to books often - as if they were shrines and cathedrals of learning that television had plundered and then abandoned.

source: - John Irving (2012). “A Prayer For Owen Meany”, p.275, Random House

Topics: Book, Grandmother, Finals

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

source: - "A Widow for One Year". Book by John Irving (Part II, Chapter 7), May 5, 1998.

Topics: Feet, Needs, Knows

I have no respect for the right-to-life position. But when you legislate personal belief, you're in violation of freedom of religion. The Catholic Church may espouse its opinion on abortion to the members of its congregation. But they are in violation of separation of church and state when they try to proselytize their abortion politics on people who are not Catholics.

Topics: People, Abortion, Catholic, Freedom Of Religion, Congregation

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

source: - John Irving (2012). “A Prayer for Owen Meany: A Novel”, p.32, Harper Collins

Topics: Crazy, Men, Happy Woman, Truly Happy

I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.

source: - John Irving (2012). “A Prayer For Owen Meany”, p.562, Random House

Topics: Years, Civilization, Perception

Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.

source: - John Irving (2012). “Last Night in Twisted River”, p.633, Random House

Topics: Hero, Trying, Alive

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

Topics: Tattoo, Men, Giving

I've always been interested in miracles, or the miraculous of the unexplained. I don't scoff at what makes people believe or want to believe. I think I understand the tremendous attraction of the mysteries of the church to the same degree that I understand and appreciate the frustration people feel, especially believers, with the human rule-making arm of the church, with the not-miraculous part of the church - any church.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Believe, Frustration, Thinking, Unexplained

When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?

source: - John Irving (2012). “The Cider House Rules”, p.529, Random House

Topics: People, Enough Time, Want, Homecoming

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

Topics: Book, Writing, Long

I always begin with a character or characters, and then try to think up as much action for them as possible.

Topics: Character, Thinking, Trying

I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.

source: - John Irving (2012). “A Prayer For Owen Meany”, p.604, Random House

Topics: Nervous, Not Afraid

A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.

source: - John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket

Topics: Men, Naked, Half

My life as a writer consists of 1/8 talent and 7/8 discipline.

Topics: Motivation, Discipline, Talent

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.

Topics: Falling In Love, Liars, Ordinary

Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!

Topics: Thinking Of You, Children, Crazy

There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.

source: - John Irving (2012). “A Widow For One Year”, p.190, Random House

Topics: Children, Real, World

And Father said, “There are no happy endings.” “Right!” cried Iowa Bob – an odd mixture of exuberance and stoicism in his cracked voice. “Death is horrible, final, and frequently premature,” Coach Bob declared. “So what?” my father said. “Right!” cried Iowa Bob. “That’s the point: So what?” Thus the family maxim was that an unhappy ending did not undermine a rich and energetic life. This was based on the belief that there were no happy endings.

source: - "The Hotel New Hampshire". Book by John Irving, 1981.

Topics: Father, Iowa, Voice, Cracked, Stoicism

The desire to never leave your side, the desire to never see you again. The desire to see your face asleep on the pillow beside my face and to see your eyes open in the morning when I lie next to you—just watching you, waiting for you to wake up.

Topics: Morning, Lying, Eye

Death, it seems," Garp wrote, "does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.

source: - John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket

Topics: Waiting, Doe, Dramatic

He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.

Topics: Being Ignored, Rivals, Ignored

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.

source: - John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket

Topics: Jobs, Memories, Cities, Dead Alive, Vividness

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

source: - John Irving (2016). “Trying to Save Piggy Sneed: 20th Anniversary Edition”, p.22, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

Topics: Sound, Lessons, Imagine

I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Writing, People, Degrees, Proselytizing

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

Topics: Littles

All the unimaginative assholes in the world who imagine that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because it was impossible from what we know about Shakespeare of Stratford that such a man would have had the experience to imagine such things - well, this denies the very thing that separates Shakespeare from almost every other writer in the world: an imagination that is untouchable and nonstop.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Men, Imagination, World, Untouchables

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.

source: - John Irving (2012). “In One Person: A Novel”, p.372, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Live Your Life, Stills, Happenings, Overview

It is an important distinction to note that she looked not only as if she had taken good care of herself, but that she had good reason to have done so. (...) She looked to be in such total possession of her life that only the most confident men could continue to look at her if she looked back at them. Even in bus stations, she was a woman who was stared at only until she looked back.

Topics: Taken, Men, Important

If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.

Topics: Pride, Moral, Sin

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

source: - John Irving (2012). “In One Person: A Novel”, p.218, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Rumor, Stories, Care

I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.

Topics: Basketball, Wrestling, Weekend, Small World

A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.

Topics: Wall, Writing, Diaries, Wallowing

I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst and I'm not an intellectual.

source: - "Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving review - dreaming the past into life" by Alex Clark, www.theguardian.com. January 5, 2016.

Topics: Intellectual, Analysts, Old Fashioned

He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted.

source: - John Irving (2012). “In One Person: A Novel”, p.139, Simon and Schuster

Topics: People, Littles, Gifted

The object of war is to survive it.

Topics: War, Objects

It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.

source: - John Irving (2012). “In One Person: A Novel”, p.102, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Seventeen, Knows, Exhausting

If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.

source: - John Irving (1989). “A prayer for Owen Meany: a novel”, William Morrow & Co

Topics: Television, Alive, Feels, Watching Television

Adolescence-is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?

Topics: Firsts, First Time, Terrible

…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.

source: - John Irving (2012). “A Widow For One Year”, p.43, Random House

Topics: Naked, Firsts, First Time

A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.

source: - John Irving (2012). “A Son Of The Circus”, p.103, Random House

Topics: Motivation, Stronger, Injustice

People regard art too highly, and history not enough

source: - John Irving (2012). “The 158-Pound Marriage”, p.21, Random House

Topics: Art, People, Enough

Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.

source: - John Irving (2012). “A Prayer For Owen Meany”, p.296, Random House

Topics: Loneliness, Comforting, Combat

Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!

source: - John Irving (1986). “The Hotel New Hampshire”

Topics: Moving, Hampshire, Hotel, New Hampshire

… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human.

Topics: Being Human, Form, Humans, Exhaustion

I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions.

source: - "Novelist John Irving Plays Not My Job". "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" with Peter Sagal, www.npr.org. June 14, 2012.

Topics: Multiple Choice, Choices, Records

Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.

source: - John Irving (2012). “In One Person: A Novel”, p.260, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Ambition, Childhood, Adults

She was an expert at the art of sudden appearance.

Topics: Art, Experts, Appearance

I always know more about the ending, even the aftermath to the ending, than I know about the beginning. And so there's a construction that works from back to front.

source: - "Why novelist John Irving's latest protagonist is a fiction writer". "PBS NewsHour" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. November 3, 2015.

Topics: Aftermath, Construction, Knows

Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.

Topics: Hard Work, Writing, Wrestling

I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.

source: - Interview with Suzanne Herel, www.motherjones.com. May/June 1997.

Topics: Character, Interest, Situation

I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.

source: - Interview with Suzanne Herel, www.motherjones.com. May 1997.

Topics: Believe, Stories, Behavior

Homer and Candy passed by the empty and brightly lit dispensary; they peeked into Nurse Angela's empty office. Homer knew better than to peek into the delivery room when the light was on. From the dormitory, they could hear Dr. Larch's reading voice. Although Candy held tightly to his hand, Homer was inclined to hurry - in order not to miss the bedtime story.

Topics: Reading, Light, Hands, Delivery Room, Dormitory

He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.

source: - "John Irving's Last Night in Twisted River". Interview with Ramona Koval, www.abc.net.au. January 29, 2010.

Topics: Coincidence, Young, Novel, Forethought

You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.

source: - John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket

Topics: Nice, Hands, Squeezing, Oldest Friends

In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.

source: - John Irving (1986). “The Hotel New Hampshire”

Topics: Memorable, Thinking, Trying

There are always suicides among people who are unable to say what they mean.

source: - John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket

Topics: Suicide, Mean, People

I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.

source: - "Novelist John Irving Plays Not My Job". "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" with Peter Sagal, www.npr.org. February 22, 2013.

Topics: Writing, Firsts, Written

People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.

Topics: People, Trying, Sound, Disapproving

You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.

source: - John Irving (2012). “In One Person: A Novel”, p.116, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Lovers

If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one. But we are a country - USA - that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck.

source: - Interview with Suzanne Herel, www.motherjones.com. May/June 1997.

Topics: Running, Country, Religious

The lie, of course, is more interesting.

Topics: Lying, Interesting, Courses

The book works better if I know everything I can about the ending. Not just what happens, but how it happens and what the language is; not just the last sentence, but enough of the sentences surrounding that last sentence to know what the tone of voice is. I imagined it as something almost musical. Then you are writing toward something; you know the sound of your voice at the end of the story. That's how you want to sound in those final sentences: the degree that it is uplifting or not, the degree that it is melancholic or not.

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Uplifting, Book, Writing

You can't say you're going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We - Americans - permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it.

source: - Interview with Suzanne Herel, www.motherjones.com. May/June 1997.

Topics: Country, Play, Names, Good Taste

The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.

Topics: Love, Writing, Reason

I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.

Topics: Rhinos, Bird, Be Kind, Rhinoceros

I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.

Topics: Birthday, Sports, Writing, Contact Sports

As it was, things went from bad to worse, as they often will when amateurs are involved in an activity that they perform in bad temper – or in a hurry.

Topics: Temper, Bad Temper, Activity

Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.

source: - John Irving (2016). “Trying to Save Piggy Sneed: 20th Anniversary Edition”, p.248, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

Topics: Disappointment, Successful, People

In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?

Topics: Book, Reading, School

No one could have fathomed what a life he'd led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.

Topics: Mind

She felt detached from her family, and thought it strange how they had lavished so much attention on her, as a child, and then at some appointed, prearranged time they seemed to stop the flow of affection and being the expectations - as if, for a brief phrase, you were expected to absorb love (and get enough), and then, for a much longer and more serious phase, you were expected to fulfill certain obligations.

Topics: Children, Expectations, Attention, Detached

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield) “But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.

Topics: Night, Journey, Gone

Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.

source: - John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket

Topics: Real, Cancer, Reading

My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!

source: - John Irving (2012). “In One Person: A Novel”, p.198, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Boys, Labels, Categories, Get To Know Me

You bet I write disaster fiction. We have compiled a disastrous record on this planet, a record of stupidity and absurdity and self-abuse and self-aggrandizement and self-deception and pompousness and self-righteousness and cruelty and indifference beyond what any other species has demonstrated the capacity for, which is the capacity for all the above.

Topics: Writing, Self, Stupidity, Self Deception

This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.

source: - John Irving (1989). “A prayer for Owen Meany: a novel”, William Morrow & Co

Topics: Self, Doe, Use

The concept of writing a novel and not knowing where it's going - I don't know how to do that. Novels are plot- and character-driven, so if I don't know what becomes of people, how can I know where it should begin?

source: - Source: www.guernicamag.com

Topics: Writing, Character, Knowing

But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.

Topics: Thinking, People, Busy

But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.

source: - John Irving (1986). “The Hotel New Hampshire”

Topics: War, Believe, Self

Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.

source: - John Irving (2012). “In One Person: A Novel”, p.165, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Loneliness, Self, Hatred, Self Hatred

You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.

source: - John Irving (1986). “The Hotel New Hampshire”

Topics: Opportunity, One Day, World

Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.

source: - John Irving (2012). “A Widow For One Year”, p.271, Random House

Topics: People, Majority, Population

Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.

source: - John Irving (1989). “A prayer for Owen Meany: a novel”, William Morrow & Co

Topics: Ice Cream, Issues, Newspapers

Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.

Topics: Thinking, Cookies, Sober

so my grandmother was not without humanity. and if she wore cocktail dresses when she labored in the garden, they were cocktail dresses she no longer intended to wear to cocktail parties. even in her rose garden she did not want to appear underdressed. if the dresses got too dirty from gardening, she threw them out. when my mother suggested to her that she might have them cleaned, my grandmother said, "what? and have those people at the cleaners what i was doing in a dress to make it that dirty?" from my grandmother i learned that logic is relative.

Topics: Mother, Party, Dirty, Cocktail Parties, Cocktail Dresses

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

Topics: Giving, Asking, Please

Life," Garp wrote, "is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.

Topics: Memories, Nihilist, Ends

when however small a measure of jealousy is mixed with misunderstanding, there is always going to be trouble.

Topics: Trouble, Misunderstanding

Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water... remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.

source: - John Irving (2012). “A Prayer for Owen Meany: A Novel”, p.31, Harper Collins

Topics: Water, Stopping, Coins, Owen Meany

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.

Topics: Optimism, Risk, Quality

My brain is sending poison to my heart.

source: - John Irving (2012). “The Cider House Rules”, p.286, Random House

Topics: Heart, Brain, Poison