John Irving Quotes

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?

~ John Irving

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

~ John Irving

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

~ John Irving

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

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

~ John Irving

Because who can describe the look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death?

~ John Irving

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

Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.

~ John Irving

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.

~ John Irving

Keep passing the open windows.

~ John Irving

I realize that a writer's business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again, forever.

~ John Irving

Ruth Cole was a novelist, novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police - preferably in writing.

~ John Irving

Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prostitute with a customer, she had failed to come away with the most important detail of all. She could never identify the murderer; she could barely describe him. She'd made a point of not looking at him!

~ John Irving

Nostalgia! Miss Frost cried. You´re nostalgic! She repeated. Just how old are you, William? She asked.Seventeen, I told her.Seventeen! Miss Frost cried, as if she'd been stabbed. Well, William Abbott, if you're nostalgic at seventeen, maybe you are going to be a writer!

~ John Irving

According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I'd written any ficton, by wich she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I prefered this kind of fantasising or pure imagining to what other people generally liked - she meant reality, of course.

~ John Irving

Mother's intentions were always sound, never muddy; I don't imagine that she troubled herself to feel very guilty. But the Rev. Mr. Merrill was a man who took to wallowing in guilt; his remorse, after all, was all he had to cling to-especially after his scant courage left him, and he was forced to acknowledge that he would never be brave enough to abandon his miserable wife and children for my mother. He would continue to torture himself, of course, with the insistent and self-destructive notion that he loved my mother. I suppose that his love of my mother was as intellectually detached from feeling and action as his belief was also subject to his immense capacity for remote and unrealistic interpretation. My mother was a healthier animal; when he said he wouldn't leave his family for her, she simply put him out of her mind and went on singing.But as incapable as he was of a heartfelt response to a real situation, the Rev. Mr. Merrill was tirelessly capable of thinking; he pondered and brooded and surmised and second-guessed my mother to death.

~ John Irving

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

~ John Irving

Your memory is a monster, you forget - it doesn't.

~ John Irving

MAYBE YOU SHOULD BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR. AT LEAST, YOU GET TO READ STUFF THAT'S WRITTEN BY PEOPLE WHO CAN WRITE! YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING TO BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR, YOU DON'T NEED ANY SPECIAL TALENT, YOU JUST HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT SOMEONE WANTS YOU TO SEE - TO WHAT MAKES SOMEONE ANGRIEST, OR THE MOST EXCITED IN SOME OTHER WAY. IT'S SO EASY!; I THINK THAT'S WHY THERE ARE SO MANY ENGLISH MAJORS!

~ John Irving

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

~ John Irving

As Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions.

~ John Irving

We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.

~ 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

You can't possibly know that you're going to be a writer! Miss Frost said. It's not a career choice.

~ John Irving

Six-Pack didn't despise George W. Bush to the degree that Ketchum did, but she thought the president was a smirking twerp and a dumbed-down daddy's boy, and she agreed with Ketchum's assessment that Bush would be as worthless as wet crap in even the smallest crisis. If a fight broke out between two small dogs, for example, Ketchum claimed that Bush would call the fire department and ask them to bring a hose; then the president would position himself at a safe distance from the dogfight, and wait for the firemen to show up. The part Pam liked best about this assessment was that Ketchum said the president would instantly look self-important, and would appear to be actively involved--that is, once the firefighters and their hose arrived, and provided there was anything remaining of the mess the two dogs might have made of each other in the interim.

~ John Irving

A terrorist, I think, is simply another kind of pornographer. The pornographer pretends he is disgusted by his work; the terrorist pretends he is uninterested in the means. The ends, they say, are what they care about. But they are both lying. Ernst loved his pornography; Ernst worshiped the means. It is never the ends that matter -- it is only the means that matter. The terrorist and the pornographer are in it for the means. The means is everything to them. The blast of the bomb, the elephant position, the Schlagobers and blood -- they love it all. Their intellectual detachment is a fraud; their indifference is feigned. They both tell lies about having ‘higher purposes.’ A terrorist is a pornographer.

~ John Irving

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

~ John Irving

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

~ John Irving

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

Small towns may revile you, but they have to keep you-they can't turn you away.

~ John Irving

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

Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label -- to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be.

~ John Irving

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

~ John Irving

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

~ John Irving

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

~ John Irving

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

Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer —not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.

~ John Irving

Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstance. That wasn't much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments of her former credo.

~ John Irving

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

~ John Irving

At times, he admitted, he had been very happy in the apple business. He knew what Larch would have told him: that his happiness was not the point, or that it wasn't as important as his usefulness.

~ John Irving