John Irving Quotes

108 Sourced Quotes

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
To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.

John Irving
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.

John Irving
On his process for writing novels:
I can't imagine what the first sentence is, I can't imagine where I want the reader to enter the story, if I don't know where the reader is going to leave the story. So once I know what the last thing the reader hears is, I can work my way backward, like following a roadmap in reverse.

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

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

John Irving
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
A reader told me recently, in London, said that 'well, I read that you write the last sentence first, so I always read your last sentence first.' And I said, 'oh, no, you're not supposed to do that.'

John Irving
But we are not known for our ability to follow through on our unearned discoveries. We are top-of-the-water adventurers, who limit our opinions of the icebergs to what we can see.

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

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

John Irving
… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.

John Irving
The kind of people claiming to be in communication with God today … they are enough to drive a real Christian crazy!

John Irving
You cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.

John Irving
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.

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

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

John Irving
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
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
Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

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

John Irving
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.

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

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

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

John Irving
No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen...You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.

John Irving
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.

John Irving
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
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