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John Irving
20 quotes
“He wrote Helen that "a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around you who's enough like yourself to understand you.”
John Irving (born 1942) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The World According to Garp (1978), ch. 5
“Imagining something is better than remembering something.”
John Irving (born 1942) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The World According to Garp (1978)
“Imagination, he realized, came harder than memory.”
John Irving (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”
John Irving (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.”
John Irving (born 1942) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), ch. 6
“You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.”
John Irving (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.”
John Irving (born 1942) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (1989), ch. 9
“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!”
John Irving (born 1942) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (1989)
“Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean—make sure they know what they mean!”
John Irving (born 1942) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (1989)
“The kind of people claiming to be in communication with God today … they are enough to drive a real Christian crazy!”
John Irving (born 1942) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (1989)
“But we are not known for our ability to follow through on our unearned discoveries. We are top-of-the-water adventurers, who limit our opinions of the icebergs to what we can see.”
John Irving (born 1942) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (1996)
“You can't learn everything you need to know legally.”
John Irving (born 1942) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Widow for One Year (1998), part II, ch. 7
“Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.”
John Irving (born 1942) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Until I Find You (2005), ch. 25, p. 493
“I can't imagine what the first sentence is, I can't imagine where I want the reader to enter the story, if I don't know where the reader is going to leave the story. So once I know what the last thing the reader hears is, I can work my way backward, like following a roadmap in reverse.”
John Irving (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A reader told me recently, in London, said that 'well, I read that you write the last sentence first, so I always read your last sentence first.' And I said, 'oh, no, you're not supposed to do that.'”
John Irving (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ted Seabrooke, my wrestling coach, had a kind of Nietzschean effect on me in terms of not just his estimation of my limited abilities, but his decidedly philosophical stance about how to conduct your life, what you should do to compensate for your limitations. This was essential to me, both as a student—and not a good one—and as a wrestler who was not a natural athlete but who had found something he loved.”
John Irving (born 1942) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: John Irving Interviewed by Suzanne Herel." Mother Jones magazine, May/June 1997.
“This is Marxism. It's leveling everything by decimating what works ... It's that vindictive 'We've suffered, and now we're going to take money from your kid and watch you squirm'... There's a minority which is an open target in this country which no one protects, and that's rich people.”
John Irving (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I write repeatedly—against my will—of those things I fear most happening. Losing a loved one, losing a parent, losing a child. I'm in terror of losing a child. It's never happened to me, but I am clearly compelled to write about it over and over again, and in a way I think, psychologically at least, this says more about me autobiographically as a novelist than the fact that Danny Angel goes to the Iowa Writers Workshop and has Kurt Vonnegut as a teacher, which I also did.”
John Irving (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Irving (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.”
John Irving (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source