John Irving Quotes
I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye.
Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.
Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you
Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true.
Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
...every study of the gods, of everyone's gods, is a revelation of vengeance towards the innocent.
I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.
I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.
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?
There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.
I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
I'm not a movie person. They're collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.
The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.
A part of adolescence is feelimg that there's no one else around who's enough like youself to understand you.
Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president's particular agenda - and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
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.
I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.
What a phrase that is: 'that explains everything!' I know better than to think anything 'explains everything' today.
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.
Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
When people say that German or any other language is romantic... all they really mean is that they've enjoyed a past in the language
Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.
He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
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.
Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
YOU LET ME DROWN!” Owen said. “YOU DIDN’T DO ANYTHING! YOU JUST WATCHED ME DROWN! I’M ALREADY DEAD!” he told us. “REMEMBER THAT: YOU LET ME DIE.
(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.
I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them...they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.
When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
You don't have to be in the habit of going to church to listen to such a literary minister; you don't have to be a believer to be moved by Mr. Buechner's faith.
It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
I always begin with a character or characters, and then try to think up as much action for them as possible.