Top 341 Quotes & Sayings by John Irving - Page 3

I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.

I thought some of the stories were neat; I liked some of the liturgy and some of the songs. If you're a writer you have some inclination to pay attention. I didn't just tune it out and think about baseball. So, it had an effect on me.

I'm not typing. I write only by longhand. I've always written first drafts by hand and then once I was into a second or third draft I wrote insert pages on a typewriter. But I got rid of all my typewriters about three or four novels ago and now I do everything by hand. I write by hand because it makes me go slow and going slow is what I like.

It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.

Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.

Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.

There was no manifestation of contemporary culture that did not indicate to my grandmother how steadfast was the nation's decline, how merciless our mental and moral deterioration, how swiftly all-embracing our final decadence. I never saw her read a book again; but she referred to books often - as if they were shrines and cathedrals of learning that television had plundered and then abandoned.

I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.

Anyone can be sentimental about the nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don’t believe in the resurrection, you’re not a believer." “If you don’t believe in Easter,” Owen Meany said. “Don’t kid yourself—Don’t call yourself a Christian.

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.

I have no respect for the right-to-life position. But when you legislate personal belief, you're in violation of freedom of religion. The Catholic Church may espouse its opinion on abortion to the members of its congregation. But they are in violation of separation of church and state when they try to proselytize their abortion politics on people who are not Catholics.

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.

…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.

They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.

All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.

In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they’re foreigners - even in their native lands. In our hearts... there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate loneliness are no less lonely than those who are suddenly surprised by loneliness, nor are they undeserving of our pity.

How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.

Life is an X-rated soap opera.

All the unimaginative assholes in the world who imagine that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because it was impossible from what we know about Shakespeare of Stratford that such a man would have had the experience to imagine such things - well, this denies the very thing that separates Shakespeare from almost every other writer in the world: an imagination that is untouchable and nonstop.

You think you have a memory; but it has you!

I feel more a part of the wrestling community than I feel I belong to the community of arts and letters. Why? Because wrestling requires even more dedication than writing because wrestling represents the most difficult and rewarding objective that I have ever dedicated myself to; because wrestling and wrestling coaches are among the most disciplined and self-sacrificing people I have ever known.

Life is serious but art is fun!

It's because even a good man can't always be right, that we need ... rules.

Half my life is an act of revision; more than half the act is performed with small changes.

It's magical thinking to imagine that the reason unspeakable things are being perpetrated by younger and younger people is that they've fallen under the influence of seductive, lascivious, prurient, and violent material in books, films, television. A great deal of this type of censorship has to do with absolving parents of responsibility - parents who just plop their kids in front of the television and leave them there hour upon hour.

Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.

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.

… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human.

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.

A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.

Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.

A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.

He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.

Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don't mean that you can't also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose.

Death, it seems," Garp wrote, "does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.

Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.

Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.

Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean - make sure they know what they mean!

Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.

This is a writer’s lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.

Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.

People regard art too highly, and history not enough

but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.

My life as a writer consists of 1/8 talent and 7/8 discipline.

Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.

I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.

Ever since the Christmas of 1953, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving-Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.

I've always been interested in miracles, or the miraculous of the unexplained. I don't scoff at what makes people believe or want to believe. I think I understand the tremendous attraction of the mysteries of the church to the same degree that I understand and appreciate the frustration people feel, especially believers, with the human rule-making arm of the church, with the not-miraculous part of the church - any church.

And Father said, “There are no happy endings.” “Right!” cried Iowa Bob – an odd mixture of exuberance and stoicism in his cracked voice. “Death is horrible, final, and frequently premature,” Coach Bob declared. “So what?” my father said. “Right!” cried Iowa Bob. “That’s the point: So what?” Thus the family maxim was that an unhappy ending did not undermine a rich and energetic life. This was based on the belief that there were no happy endings.

…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.

If I had to be anything," he told her, "I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

She was an expert at the art of sudden appearance.

Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!

Adolescence-is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?

You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.

The object of war is to survive it.

It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.