Top 341 Quotes & Sayings by John Irving - Page 2

As many times as I've seen 'The Merchant of Venice,' I always take Shylock's side. For all the hatred that guy is shown, he has a reason to hate in return. He's treated cruelly. And it's tragic that he learns to be intolerant because of what others do to him.

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The principal event of my childhood was that no adult in my family would tell me who my father was.

I'm not writing non-fiction. I don't feel anything about me as a kid was unique. Except that I had more interest in being alone and using my imagination.

Anybody can do research. The plotting of the novel, writing the ending before you write anything else, which I always do - I don't know that everybody can do that. That's the hard part.

I had a particular affinity for wrestling, and it did have a lot to do with being small and being combative - and being angry. And when you're small and you don't back down, you get in a lot of fights.

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 suppose I try to look for those things where the world turns on you. It's every automobile accident, every accident at a party, you're having a good time until suddenly you're not.

I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.

I don't think I've had a very interesting life, and I feel that is a great liberation. That gives me great freedom as a fiction writer. Nothing that happened holds any special tyranny over me.

If you're still wondering about details - how am I going to get these two to meet, or whatever - when you're writing, you can't pay proper attention to the sentences themselves.

I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour.

I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

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

One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.

'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.

I grew up without a father, who was kept a mystery to me. There was a sense of uprootedness, things being one day here and the next day not; a sense anything could happen. Then, all of a sudden, my mother met my stepfather, and her life became happier, and my life changed, my name changed.

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.

Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.

We are formed by what we desire

Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else's version of themselves--to anyone else's version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!

If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.

It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.

If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.

I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.

A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.

In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

My life is a reading list.

People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.

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

. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .

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.

We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.

Keep passing the open windows.

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 you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?

Grown-ups shouldn’t finish books they’re not enjoying. When you’re no longer a child, and you no longer live at home, you don’t have to finish everything on your plate. One reward of leaving school is that you don’t have to finish books you don’t like.

Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.

We invent what we love and what we fear.

The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.

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

We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.

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.

Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.

It´s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can't interfere with people you love any more than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know. And that's hard, ..., because you often feel like interfering -you want to be the one who makes the plans.

We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly--as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth--the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives

There's nothing as scary as the future.

Human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions.

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

The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.

It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.

Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.

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.

Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.

You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

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