John Irving Quotes
If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.
I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn't very vital.
. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
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.
The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.
Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.
The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
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.
Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.
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.
The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.
Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!
You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life
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.
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes.
Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.
Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.
but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.