John Irving Quotes
John Irving Quotes
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
2470It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.
2752 A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
3716 If you're a writer, the problem is that, when you try to call a halt to thinking about your novel-in-progress, your imagination still keeps going; you can't shut it off.
4200 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.
1463 In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore. And if you're not either people think there is something wrong with you....but there is nothing wrong with me
2968 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.
4027 My life is a reading list.
4790 It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.
4569 Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true.
4630 Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
2854 When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. ‘’I lost one, too,’’ they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn’t lost any children. I’m just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)
1139 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.
4879 O God - please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
3768 Many things the gods achieve beyond our judgement,'" said the sorrowful girl. "'What we thought is not confirmed and what we thought not God contives.
3473 You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
2982 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."
(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)
3456 In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
4327 Life is serious but art is fun!
1409 Half my life is an act of revision.
2603 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.
4297 Well, you finally got me," Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on his back on the wrestling mat, wondering who had gotten whom.
2672 People regard art too highly, and history not enough
3441 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.
1724 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.
4476 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.
4927 I you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
2504 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.
2713 This mannerism of what he'd seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people - because, surely, Wally was nice - would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At. St. Cloud's, criticism was plainer - and harder, if not impossible, to conceal.
2733 Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.
3789 Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties."
(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)
1137 Vielleicht muss es im Leben eines Schriftstellers diesen Augenblick geben, in dem ein anderer Schriftsteller beschuldigt wird, seinen Beruf verfehlt zu haben.
4320 