Top 380 John Irving Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.”

— John Irving

2. “You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.”

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

4. “Ad majorem Dei gloriam – to the greater glory of God.”

— John Irving

5. “Keep passing the open windows.”

— John Irving

6. “There’s nothing as scary as the future.”

— John Irving

7. “Your memory is a monster; it summons with will of its own. You think you have a memory, but it has you.”

— John Irving

Featured in: Quotes About Memories

8. “Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.”

— John Irving

9. “You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.”

— John Irving

10. “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

11. “Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.”

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

13. “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.”

— John Irving

14. “Sic transit gloria mundi.”

— John Irving

15. “What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life – to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?”

— John Irving

16. “If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.”

— John Irving

17. “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.”

— John Irving

18. “Good habits are worth being fanatical about.”

— John Irving

19. “Life is serious but art is fun!”

— John Irving

Featured in: Fun Quotes

20. “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.”

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

22. “Half my life is an act of revision.”

— John Irving

23. “A writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.”

— John Irving

24. “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.”

— John Irving

25. “Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.”

— John Irving

26. “We are formed by what we desire.”

— John Irving

27. “I’m old-fashioned, a storyteller. I’m not an analyst and I’m not an intellectual.”

— John Irving

28. “You live your life at the time you live it – you don’t have much of an overview when what’s happening to you is still happening.”

— John Irving

29. “I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.”

— John Irving

30. “O God – please give him back! I shall keep asking You.”

— John Irving

31. “The main character and the most important character are not always the same person – you have to know the difference.”

— John Irving

32. “Imagining something is better than remembering something.”

— John Irving

33. “My life is a reading list.”

— John Irving

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— John Irving

35. “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.”

— John Irving

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

36. “It’s my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support; they want someone to say, “Good job.””

— John Irving

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

— John Irving

38. “You know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes. No, you have to be able to imagine something else. While you’re skipping rope, you have to be able to see something else.”

— John Irving

39. “It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.”

— John Irving

40. “My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me – don’t make me a category before you get to know me!”

— John Irving

41. “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”

— John Irving

42. “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.”

— John Irving

43. “And never forget, there is memory.”

— John Irving

44. “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

Featured in: Surfing Quotes

45. “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.”

— John Irving

46. “Being afraid you’ll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.”

— John Irving

47. “In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us – not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.”

— John Irving

48. “I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.”

— John Irving

49. “Sometimes, when we are labeled, when we are branded, our brand becomes our calling;.”

— John Irving

50. “Things often are as they appear. First impressions matter.”

— John Irving