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John Irving Quotes | Quotes said by John Irving

  • John Irving Quote #1

    (Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action

  • John Irving Quote #2

    ...friends were more important than lovers - not least for the fact that friendships generally lasted longer than relationships.

  • John Irving Quote #3

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

  • John Irving Quote #4

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

  • John Irving Quote #5

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

  • John Irving Quote #6

    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 Quote #7

    A person's faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to pray. Just when I start to hear the prayer, everyone pops up to sing. And what does the stupid sermon have to do with God? Who knows what God thinks of current events? Who cares?

  • John Irving Quote #8

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

  • John Irving Quote #9

    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 Quote #10

    All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let's just leave them be. Don't judge them. You are not superior to them - don't put them down.

  • John Irving Quote #11

    And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.

  • John Irving Quote #12

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

  • John Irving Quote #13

    And what were the rules at St. Cloud's? What were Larch's rules? Which rules did Dr. Larch observe, which ones did he break, or replace--and with what confidence?

  • John Irving Quote #14

    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 Quote #15

    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 Quote #16

    Bill is a fiction writer, but he writes in the first-person voice in a style that is tell-all confessional; in fact, his fiction sounds as much like a memoir as he can make it sound.

  • John Irving Quote #17

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

  • John Irving Quote #18

    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 Quote #19

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

  • John Irving Quote #20

    Ever since the Christmas of '53, 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 Quote #21

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

  • John Irving Quote #22

    For a terrible time of life a teen-ager deceives himself; he believes he can trick the world. He believes he is invulnerable. An adolescent who is an orphan at this phase is in danger of never growing up.

  • John Irving Quote #23

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

  • John Irving Quote #24

    Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

  • John Irving Quote #25

    Half my life is an act of revision.

  • John Irving Quote #26

    He felt like hearing Mrs. Grogan’s prayer again, and so he went to the girls’ division a little early for his usual delivery of Jane Eyre. He eavesdropped in the hall on Mrs. Grogan’s prayer; I must ask her if she’d mind saying it to the boys, he thought, then wondered if it would confuse the boys coming so quickly on the heels of, or just before, the Princes of Maine, Kings of New England benediction. I get confused myself sometimes, Dr. Larch knew.

    ‘Grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest,’ Mrs. Grogan was saying, ‘and peace at the last.’

    Amen, thought Wilbur Larch, the saint of St. Cloud’s, who was seventy-something, and an ether addict, and who felt that he’d come a long way and still had a long way to go.

  • John Irving Quote #27

    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 Quote #28

    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 Quote #29

    I grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around.

  • John Irving Quote #30

    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.

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