John Irving Quotes

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

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

I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.

Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.

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.

I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.

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

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

The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings; the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.

Here in St. Cloud’s,” Dr. Larch wrote, “ I have been given the choice of playing God or leaving practically everything up to chance. It is my experience that practically everything is left up to chance much of the time; men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God – we should seize those moments. There won’t be may

I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.

I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, "I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure." It doesn't bother me if people feel that way.

You think you have a memory; but it has you!

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.

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

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

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

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

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

Because who can describe that 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?

If you asked me one day, I might say, "Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious." If you asked me another day, I'd just say flat out, "No."

I'm a worst-case scenario person. I'm only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.

There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.

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!

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.

Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.

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.

We invent what we love and what we fear.

It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written 11 novels. Many of them haven't written one.

If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.

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

I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.

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.

We permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it - and reward it in all manner of ways.

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

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

He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson

You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.

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